Thursday, October 30, 2003

Rotten news all around

Harry C. Stubbs 1922 - 2003
I really only had one idol in fandom, and that was Harry Stubbs, aka "Hal Clement." I don't know what to say, but a personal farewell to one of the best guests a convention could ever hope for.

Hal was a right gentleman. He never acted like he was any better than anyone else. I have said since the day I met him in 1987 that I wanted to be an author just like him. Maybe he never made the best seller list, maybe modern people haven't heard of his works much, but he was truly a great person. I am honored and humbled to have been on panels with him. Like many fen, I had spent long nights talking with him in hotel lobbies about his past as a pilot, past conventions, and just general ideas he picked up from various experiences. He was a great panelist who really shared an enthusiasm for people in his audience. He also donated a lot of blood, some several gallons worth, and when I donate blood, I think about that. I think I have a picture of him and me somewhere, and if I find it, I'll post it.

I recall one random story of his, back from his days as a pilot in WW2. He said it was really foggy, and planes were having trouble finding the tower to land. Finally, one frustrated pilot said over the radio, "Where the fuck is the runway??" The British tower commander grabbed the microphone and demanded to know the name, rank, and superior officer of the person who made that crude remark. "I may be lost, sir, but I am not stupid," was the only reply.

I will miss you, Hal. A lot. I only hope I honor you as both and author and a polite guest.

Jason's not coming for New Year's
Almost every year, maybe every year, my old school bud Jason Aufdenberg (now Dr. Aufdenberg) comes over for New Year's. But a few months ago, he left his position at Harvard, and is now working as a Michelson Postdoctoral Fellow for The Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy in Arizona. He's coming back to the DC area in December, but he won't be here for New Year's. Crudbuckets! At least his excuse is a good one. He's also volunteering some time to help a 6th grade teacher, and facing sixth graders. Well, one of his previous jobs was to teach astronomy to college freshmen, so maybe that's not so different :).

Posted by Punkie @ 03:33 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Vacation dreams... and alien etiquette

Well, I didn't make it to New York like I planned, so I have been lounging around and sleeping late. Also doing some housework. Nate brought by some Gamecube games, and I realized just how bad I am at them. I played GTA3 a lot. This makes for a boring journal. So I dug into my vault of old text clippings, and pulled this one from a December 1992 posting by a guy I only knew as "LORD MHORAM:"

=========================================================
This thread reminds me of a short story I read in a book called "Microcosmic Tales" (a collection of SHORT short SF)... anyway, here's an excerpt from "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" by Joanna Russ:

AT THE PARTY:
- Is that you?
- Is that all of you? How much (many) of you is (are) there?
- I am happy to meet your clone
- Are you edible? I am not edible.
- Is this intended to be erotic?
- Are you pregnant?
- Can't we just be friends?
- Although I am very flattered by your kind offer, I cannot accompany you to the mating pits, as I am viviparous.

IN THE HOSPITAL:
- My eating orifice is not at that end of my body.
- Placing the thermometer there will yield little or no information.

AT THE THEATRE:
- Is this supposed to be erotic?
- Is this part of the performance?
- My religious convictions prevent me from joining in the performance.
- Stop touching me.
- Sir or Madam, that is mine (extrinsic).
- Sir or Madam, that is mine (intrinsic).

Posted by Punkie @ 02:41 PM EST [Link]

Sunday, October 26, 2003

On Saturns, colds, and missed birthdays...

Well, as I type this I have a cold. AH-choo! It's the one my son has, and my wife got but lost last night. Well, I'll get over it.

On Friday, Christine and I drove to the Saturn dealership to look at the new Saturn VUE. Yes, an SUV. The very type of car I used to hate. We had been thinking about exchanging our old wagon and newer coupe for one car, for several reasons. First, we found we're ferrying people around a lot more for some reason (friends, our own family, the dogs, and whatnot), and if we have to travel with luggage, it was hard. That's why we rented a van when we went to the last few beach trips. Second, we don't fit very well in that car. Both are low to the ground, which makes me with long legs getting out difficult, and to drive it? Christine could fit, but our heads kept hitting the roof, and when I tried to drive, it was almost comical because the steering column was almost resting across my crotch, even with the seat far back. The VUE offered good gas mileage for an SUV (22/29), plus the room we needed for everyone, and their cargo. But we'd never test drove it. It's certainly very roomy, and we liked it very much. Now we have to figure out how to afford it. Right now, they are desperate to sell cars. The economy is pretty bad, and they have some 0% financing options, or some long 72-month financing, which normally I'd never recommend, but Saturns last a long time, I have a habit of paying off loans WAY before the end. And with the Saturn dealership, they don't play a lot of normal car dealership games.

Friday night, I didn't feel so good, but my friend Brad invited us to his birthday party at the local Hama Sushi, which has consistently been the highest rated local Sushi place. The food was great, as always, but then my back started to hurt a lot, and I think I was just tired. We came back to my house and watched "Boondock Saints," but I was only able to watch about half an hour of it because my back hurt so bad. I took some pain medication, and went to bed.

On Saturday, I felt terrible. CR still had a fever, but I was very icky. But I had to get up early and go to work. Yes, on a Saturday. Our internal computing department was shutting down the whole network, and when they do that, it can screw up our data real bad. So I had to babysit the whole thing, and thankfully, they didn't foul up as much as they usually do. Then we went out to get some parts to fix the Saturn Wagon (it hasn't started for months). Well, we got a new battery, some fix-a-flat, and whattia know, it started right up! I still can't figure out how we couldn't jump start it, but everyone told us to get a new battery, and they were right! Thank God, because I gave up, and was ready to call a repair place. That saved me quite a lot. Yay, my friends! And Yay Christine for helping me with the car.

By the time all this was over, I was exhausted. I was invited to my friend Sean's party, but with CR being sick, me feeling terrible, I just knew I'd go and get all my friends sick. I really wanted to go, because I haven't seen him in ages, but he has three kids, and I didn't want them all to get sick, either. Sorry, Sean. I really wanted to see you off before your trip to Chile, too. :(

Today I am going to try to get better, but thankfully, I have the rest of the week off. because I worked Saturday, I got next Monday off, too.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:46 AM EST [Link]

Friday, October 24, 2003

Fun Time!

Some fun things to do when you are stressed:

Put any self-pitying Goth poser rhetoric in the AOL Translator, or through Valley URL. Here's an example, but instead of poking fun at my Goth pals again, I'll chose something from family.org about "What should rabid, paranoid Christians do about Halloween?"

AOL 12-year-old:
REMEMBR TAHT PARTICIPATNG IN AN ALTERNATIEV IS NOT DA SM3 THNG AS C3LEBRATNG TEH HOLIDAY!1!!!1 WTF WHEN WE CELEBRAET A HOLIDAY LIEK HALOWEN WA R PUBLICLY BRNGNG SOMA SORT OF HONOR 2 TEH DAY11!1! WTF LOL WHAN WE PARTICIPAET IN AN ALTARNATIEV W3 R TAKNG PART IN PROVIDNG A CHOIEC BTWEN HALOWEN AND SOME OTHAR AVENT1!!11!! OMG WTF LOL WA CAN CHOS3 2 B PART OF AN ALTERNATIEV 2 HALOWEN WITHOUT DA STIGMA OF 3XPR3SNG SOME TYPE OF SATISFACTION WIT TEH TRADITIONAL CEL3BRATION OF DA HOLIDAY!11! OMG LOL TEH RIGHT ALTERNATIEV CAN B SAEF AND FUN FOR KIDS AND YET STIL HONOR GOD!!111 WTF IT’S IMPORTANT TAHT OUR KIDS DO NOT FEL AS IF TH3Y R MISNG OUT ON SOMATHNG JUST B/C THAY R CHRISTIANS!1!!11!! WTF LOL ULTIMAETLY HALOWEN CAN B A GR3AT OPORTUNITY 2 “OVERCOME EVIL WIT GOD” (ROMANS 1221)!!!!1 OMG LOL

Valley Girl:
Remember that participating in an alternative is totally not the same thing as celebrating the holiday... Like, I am so sure! Like, when like we celebrate a holiday, like Halloween, like we are publicly bringing some sort of honor to the day, like, when like we participate in an alternative, like we are taking part in providing a choice between Halloween and some other event. We can choose to be part of an alternative to Halloween without the stigma of expressing some type of satisfaction with the traditional celebration of the holiday like, the right alternative can be safe and rad for kids and yet still honor Gawd. It’s important that our kids do not feel as if they are missing out on something just because they are Christians. Ultimately, Halloween can be a totally awesome opportunity to “overcome evil with bitchin' (Romans 12:21).

Hearing Voices:
Years ago, I used to work with some people who ran a help desk. One of their jobs was to monitor a large chat room where people would ask technical questions related to their service. They did this on a Mac. The Mac Operating System software had this "text-to-speech" interface at the time, and you could assign certain voices to text. There were some 16 voices, as I recall, like robot, strong man, little boy, whispering girl, and so on. The chat room software could use this feature, and most of the time, they assigned some monotone robotic voice, because "it's the most bearable when you have to constantly listen to it, and you can hear it over white noise without it being too loud." But once in a while, some jerk would be screaming and ranting in the chat room about something, and before he got booted, one of the people at the desk would switch his voice to "little girl." That was fun. You would listen to this guy swear and bitch and sound like a total wuss.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to overcome some evil with bitchin'...

Posted by Punkie @ 12:04 PM EST [Link]

A thought that keeps me awake

"Hey, will you get this, Earthman,'' interrupted Zaphod. "You are a last generation product of that computer matrix, right, and you were there right up to the moment your planet got the finger, yeah?''

Yes. And yesterday, the end trigger was pulled a little harder.

"So your brain was an organic part of the penultimate configuration of the computer programme,'' said Ford, rather lucidly he thought.

I suppose. Did the retail program end this way? I recall saying something to my manager about Mary Poppins and the changing of the winds, and then POOF, I was under a new boss who liked baseball.

"In other words,'' said Benji, steering his curious little vehicle right over to Punkie, "there's a good chance that the structure of the question is encoded in the structure of your brain --- so we want to buy it off you.''

The blog won't suffice?

"I thought you said you could just read his brain electronically,'' protested Ford.

"Oh yes,'' said Frankie, "but we'd have to get it out first. It's got to be prepared.''

[I have to stop eating pizza pockets before I go to bed...]

Posted by Punkie @ 01:58 AM EST [Link]

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Some memory issues

Not me this time, although my memory is flaky as usual. The Sun box this is hosted on has been having some bad memory issues, and has gone up and down a lot over the past few days. It probably will do so some more, as Brad waits for new RAM. Thanks for your letters of concern. Kudos to Brad, who has been working on this with a good friend who has been going back and forth to the site to get the server back up and diagnose the problems.

They rule.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:38 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

You know you're fat when...

I recall a disturbing Usenet post about 12 years ago, where someone said they first discovered they had a weight problem when they were forced to use deodorant under the flab of their belly. That post still haunts me [shudder]. I won't go on any more about that, but I will let some of my thin friends in on what fat people secretly fear: chairs.

Specifically, weak ones. I mean, there is some sort of cartoon moral lesson in the back of our brains that when a chair breaks out from under you, you are too fat. I am sure thin people have broken rickety chairs, too, but at least someone who is a mere 120 pounds can say, "That chair was busted!" When you are over 300lbs, there is an unwritten rule of thumb that states you can't blame the chair anymore. I once was talking to a guy at a party who had his leg in a soft cast. "How did that happen?" I asked. "I was leaning back in a chair, and it broke from under me. One of the broken chair legs came up and stabbed me deep in the back of my thigh. I have had two surgeries already on it so far, and they will be doing another reconstructive job in a few months." That man was maybe 170 pounds, and a lot of that was bone mass because he was at least 6' 2". Maybe 10 lbs less without the cast. Oddly enough, most fat people don't fear this as much as the actual act of breaking a chair itself from their sheer weight. Especially in front of others.

Well, two days ago, it happened to me. My office chair in my den, which has been giving us problems since the day we bought it, broke from under me. Now, unlike a wooden chair, office chairs are usually a seat on a spindle that is carried down to an array of casters. The caster array had been giving me problems before, mostly rocking back and forth, even though I had tightened the bolts many times before. But this time, quite unexpectedly while I was rising out of it to adjust my seating position, the spindle snapped through the caster array, and dropped me like a pile driver onto my concrete floor. Then it slowly tilted back until I was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, my heart racing from the bad scare. My headphones that were playing some techno music had fallen off my head, and as I lay there in shock, the only sounds I heard were the fans of my computers, and the tinny sound of a dance remix of Helen Reddy's song, "I am Woman" coming from the headphones on the floor.

"Ow...?"

Actually, at first it was more shock than pain. I rolled out of the chair, and stood up, surveying this strange behavior from a chair that up until now, just seemed stubborn and obstinate at attempts to tighten bolts. Then I saw the floor.

I had punctured the concrete about 1/4 inch deep. Right through the linoleum into hard concrete. It looked like the starting hole for a jackhammer. Holy crap. Bits of concrete were scattered around like a microcrater. I stood there for a while before I decided I had to patch this hole. But how? I mean, I could have peeled back the linoleum and got a concrete patch compound. But in the end, I just put in back most of the rubble, packed it down with a hammer, and covered the hole with duct tape. I sort of fixed the chair, too. I bent back the restraining ring, and got it is so the caster array supports the spindle, but it's a lost cause. I need a new chair.

By this time I was aware my back hurt. By that night, my back REALLY hurt, so I took some painkillers, and tried to go to sleep. That wasn't happening. By 4:00am, I figured, "Hell with this, I am taking the heavy meds." I called my boss, left him voicemail I wasn't coming in, took muscle relaxers, and tried to sleep the rest of the day. I got as far as 8am.

'YAP YAP YAP YAP WOOF WOOF YAP WOOF YAPYAPYAP... WOOF!!!" go my dogs about every 20 minutes, alerting me that someone was daring to use the public sidewalk in front of my house. The "YAP" is Widget, and the "WOOF" is Ahfu, who is really barking at Widget to get him to shut up (Widget is his dog, you see). This is what they are saying:

Widget: OH MY GOD, A PERSON! MIGHT BE DANGEROUS! LOOK OUT LOOK OUT!!
Ahfu: A PERSON A PERSON! Okay. Gone now. We showed them!
Widget: A PERSON!!!!! LOOK OUT LOOK OUT!! KILL THEM!!! GRRRRR!!! I AM STUDLY!!!!
Ahfu: I get it. A person. They left, see?
Widget: A PERSON!! MIGHT BE DANGEROUS! LOOK OUT LOOK OUT!! AAAAUGH!
Ahfu: Shut up, will you?
Widget: DIDN'T YOU SEE THERE WAS A PERSON?! THEY MIGHT STILL BE THERE! THEY MIGHT COME BACK!!
Ahfu: Oh, for the love of God, go back to sleep!
Widget: WHY DOESN'T ANYONE TAKE ME SERIOUSLY???
Ahfu: Shut up!!!

Sometimes, when Widget gets too excited, Ahfu tries to physically shut him up by jumping on him and chewing on his head. This causes a lot of growling, squeaking, and whimpering. This was happening a lot, and so, I didn't get much sleep.

I feel better now, though. Christine was nice enough to get me a heating pad, plug it in, and put it on my back when I was alseep. This helped heal me pretty quickly, but I still am burning from embarrassment over this.

"But Punkie," said a friend of mine once, "at least this will keep you off a Segway!"*

Yeah, yeah it will.

*Segway's limit is 250 lbs

Posted by Punkie @ 12:25 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Wireless Insecurity

"I thought," he said, "that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something."

"If you like, yes," said Ford.

"That's what they told us in the army," said the man, and his eyes began the long trek back down to his whisky.

"Will that help?" asked the barman.

"No," said Ford and gave him a friendly smile.

-- Ford Prefect to man at a pub, from Douglas Adam's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

I have get asked a lot why I, a tech geek, do not have wireless in my house. Simple. Security. I am not putting this in my tech geek Slashdot journal because I think everyone should know this:

Wireless is very insecure.

First, all "out of the box" wireless routers and stuff don't have security enabled. They know most everyone out there would find this complicated, so they hope that you get it up and working first, and then worry about the security next. This is okay, if you actually follow the second part. I would, and on my cable router, I have it set for the most secure possible. If that was all it took, I'd say, "Pfft... piece of cake."

But see, there are some problems. See, wireless cannot be contained within my walls. It broadcasts about 20-50 feet or more in all directions from my house. The picture in this entry shows how far your connection roams from just *one* wireless access point (More details by these fine folks). Note that not only do his three immediate neighbors have total access to his network, but that people across the street on BOTH SIDES have "weak" access as well. In fact, the people across the street from his back yard almost have full signal strength. See, this worries me more than most, because my back yard faces an alley, where anyone can park and get access.

"Okay," you say. Why should you care about access? Put a firewall on your computers and be done with it." It's not so much the breaking into my network and stealing files I am worried about. A firewall would protect that. But it's the fact that I have given anyone access to my Internet connection to do whatever they want. Download illegal files. Crack computers. Launch attacks. All that will be traced to my connection.

"Well, silly, secure your router!" Sure, I can do that. Let's look at the "big three" in wireless protection.

Allow only certain IPs: I could turn off DHCP, and have only static IPs. But IP addresses can be EASILY sniffed (detected) and then spoofed (pretending to be an IP address). In the real world, this is like posing as the delivery guy to get into a secure building.

Allow only MAC addresses: The MAC address (the physical address of your network card) is a unique number that's a bit harder to spoof. But it is spoofable. A good wardriving hacker with the right card can spoof a MAC address easily. This is like posing as a random employee to get into the building.

WEP: Wireless Encryption Protocol: This is the last, and for most, the best defense. It's kind of hard for a newbie to set up, but once working, the 128-bit encryption will be a lot harder to crack. Most people will see this and move on. This is like posing as a specific employee, with a badge, to get into a building. But a good, determined hacker can crack any WEP in less than a few hours. By, say, parking in an alley

Starbucks Coffee (in the shopping center behind my house) doesn't use WEP, and someone at my house, with a wireless connection, showed me how easy it was to get into their network. He waited for someone to log in, got their MAC, sniffed their password, decrypted it, and waited for the guy to log off. Then he connected as this guy to prove that he was a manly geek not afraid of fraud (although, to his credit, he did nothing but prove he could get Internet access before he logged off). We also saw someone with a wide-open access on their personal network, inlcuding their mp3 collection of rap music, some pr0n (hacker term for pronographic material), and how many computers were connected to that router.

There are even easy-to-use hacker tools like Phlak, Kistmet, and WarBSD that make it easier to get this stuff done. This stuff is supposed to be used to test your own network leaks, but, of course, the hardware store that sells you the flashlight, crowbar, and locksmith kit won't ask many questions, either.

So this is why I don't have wireless. Unlike the man at the pub talking to Ford, I don't have army training to tell me to put a bag over my head if the end of the world comes, or some cracker uses my network connection to attack the FBI website. The FBI can get past my paper bag.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:46 PM EST [Link]

Monday, October 20, 2003

Some cool foreign films...

I do like non-US films other than anime and kung-fu flicks. Two have recently caught my attention.

Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, which was released in the US as just "Amalie." It's a French film about a very shy and unfortunate girl who comes out of her shell and starts to meet people by doing good deeds that changes everybody's lives. I could really relate to this film, because it's sweet, slightly tragic, and reminded me of my own life at one time. The director is very good at painting portraits of characters and making them seem very real. This film moved me in ways I cannot describe, but I loved it. I will never look at photo booths the same way again.

Fucking Åmål, or "Show Me Love," in the US. It's a Swedish film about a shy girl and a bully who both realize they hate their small town, and end up sort of falling in love. This film is almost like a documentary in its feel, and is a bit like reality TV, but is still fiction. What started out as a joke accusing the shy girl of being a lesbian ends up confusing the bully who kind of liked kissing her. She's forced to rethink her own life in the small town, and how small-minded her friends are, especially her boyfriend. It ends with making chocolate milk. How bad can that be?

Posted by Punkie @ 09:00 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, October 19, 2003

Not Very Sporting of Me

I hate sports.

I do. I have always hated sports since I was a little kid. Every few years, I try to like sports, but I end up failing miserably. Last year, I tried to take an academic approach, but that went nowhere. It seems that whatever part of my male brain sports is supposed to go is a dark hole where nothing returns. I swear, someone could tell me a rule over and over again, and minutes later, I will have forgotten it. I can remember D&D stats from when I was a teen, for chrissakes, but I don't know... man, it's so bad, I can't even think of what I don't know. Words like "pennant" and "hockey" and "foosball" I know, but only from another point of view.

I am not even sure why I hate them that much. I go along, not even thinking about sports, and then someone on TV mentions some baseball thing, and I get all pissed off like, "This isn't news! Who the hell cares?" Well, experience refutes my logic: a lot of people care. Enough that it's a multi-billion dollar industry, TV news devotes about 25% of all news coverage towards it, and people talk about it so much, it's only second to an ice breaker when people talk about the weather. So why do I forget they exist, and then get mad when I hear about them?

Well, part of it has to be embarrassment. "How about them Redskins?" some parent asks at some parent function. "Did you see how Dan Flouter gooped the nip nock at the 40 yard penalty call? I swear if coach Smith doesn't fneeb the norphin, he's going to take 30 points and send the team back to next month when they lost the flag over Syracuse!" I have to either nod, hoping they just wanted someone to listen to them, or if they want a response, I have to say, "I, uh... I don't follow sports." Reactions vary to that, and I wish I could say everyone brushes it off, but I get far too many people backing away from me like I just said, "On Mars, the high concentration of carbon dioxide makes our voices sound like frog croaks, quite the opposite of helium! Ha ha ha [snort snort] haaaa!" Some ask, "S-so... what DO you follow?" like the very concept of not following sports is so foreign, that they have never actually considered a life without sports. Like if I had said, "I am sorry, I don't eat food."

Part of it is also when sports games interrupt TV shows I wanted to watch. I hate that. When I was a kid, I was allowed to watch TV very little, and most of that was what I managed to sneak in without my parents knowing. So when I wanted to watch the Muppet Show, and it was pre-empted by sports, I got furious! That's like only having one sunny day to do mow your shaggy lawn, and that day, someone borrowed your mower. I find myself shouting, "They have cable channels for this!" This is probably not a fair thing to say, being that separatist about public airwaves. But I feel if people want their sports so much, they shouldn't mind paying for it, or at least changing to a sports channel. Obviously, I am missing the point. Part of the reason I don't watch broadcast TV much anymore is the threat that sports games will have bumped up my show, or even more irritatingly, "continue with your show, already in progress." They also lie with their timers. The clock says they only have 4 minutes to go, and then half an hour later, you're watching people wander about the field while the 100th timeout some coach called is being reviewed on their little TV screen. "Yep. That's a ball, all right." Some channels will even continue with some half-hour post-game show where old players and newscasters talk about what they've just seen, with slow motion replays. And they talk and talk an talk and talk... about nothing. Over and over.

A friend of mine who loved European sports told me that one of the most irritating things about American sports is that announcers talk thought everything. It's obvious they have run out of stuff to say, but keep talking anyway. I feel all of sports is like that: it doesn't seem to have a point, or any progression. Just a bunch of people worried about a ball or flag or something, and then when they get to their final big game, someone wins, and then they do it all over again next season. I just don't get the big deal. I guess I wish people would get worked up over politics, economics, science, or something. But I also know that sports plays a vital role in the cultural psyche: even the Romans knew that. Sports is the original opiate of the masses.

I also wonder how much of my past this has to do with. My father never played sports with me, nor did he watch sports. But I hated him, so it would stand to reason I would like sports just to spite him, and that didn't happen. Maybe it's because most of the bullies that I hated were also jocks. Not really. Most of the bullies were losers who couldn't make the sports team. Is it because I hated gym? Maybe, but we didn't play many sports in gym. Most of it seemed to be stuff like gymnastics, track and field, dancing, and exercises, and so on. More Olympian stuff. We did play football, softball, soccer, and basketball, but for only a small part of the year. And I hated sports BEFORE I hated PE or gym.

I try and analyze my anger. I have discussions with myself about it. What alarms me most is the black hole where information goes in and never comes out. It's discomforting to think that a specific part of my knowledge is unrecoverable, almost like an Alzheimer's of a sort. There are two lines of reasoning I have with this: I am repressing something, or literally some part of my brain is dead (like a clump of dead cells). Neither is very comforting. If it's repressing, I fear that one day, something may break, and a flood of bad memories may erupt and I won't be able to handle them. If it's a dead part of my brain, why is it dead? Is it spreading? How come I can't rewire it? It must be a repression. But of what? Why is it getting worse with age?

At least I got over hating people who liked sports. I harkened it to "everyone has a hobby," but part of me feels bad I will never know or understand this hobby that is so popular, it almost makes me an outcast among normal adults. At work, we all used to be nerds. Now, it seems like half the people are into sports... like the "normal people" are invading my space. And I can never be into what they are into, it's like a secret language. The worst embarrassment occured a while ago, at a corporate function, when some big guy in a suit asked me if I followed some team. I said I didn't follow sports that much. He asked what I did instead and I said I work or spend time with my family, which came out wrong like I was accusing him of not working or spending time with his family. He smiled anyway, and excused himself. Later, I found out he owned some local team. And I was an idiot for not knowing this.

So it would be great if I could get to know sports. But unless I figure out what's wrong with me, I'll never get it.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:04 PM EST [Link]

Saturday, October 18, 2003

On Costumes...

I feel guilty at conventions sometimes. I really like most of the people, but I have "issues" with certain people who wear costumes. After seeing this collection, I think I have narrowed it down to two problems.

First, I can't stand people who are too "into" the character. I am not talking about what they wear, but they get some sort of persona that makes them hard to interact with. It's like they think they are real. At the Renaissance Festival, I expect that: they are paid actors. But at some media convention, some guy dressed as a Klingon who certainly ACTS like he thinks he's really a Klingon gives me the willies. I also hate it when certain people become snobs through their character. Here's an example:

Punkie: Hey, do you know where the elevators for the south tower are?
Hagrid: (dressed as Hagrid from Harry Potter) What be these towers you speak of, Muggle?
Punkie: I need to get to the PanduExCon party. I heard it's in room 405, in the south tower.
Hagrid: Oy, man! Why party with Muggles? That's what Dumbledore told me!
Punkie: If you don't know, just say so.
Hagrid: Have you heard? Harry and Hermione are making out near the Quiddich field!
Punkie: I... oh, forget it.

I once was talked at by a girl at a Trek con who vomited massive tales about android cats being allowed into the Federation. One of the scariest hours of my life.

My second beef is that some people just can't wear a costume. I am not talking about fat people in spandex (I happen to like big people, especially the ladies), but I am talking about the *people* in the costumes. There are two things I see wrong with a lot of people in costumes: confidence and personal detail. By confidence, I mean, if you are going to wear the costume, man, don't wear it like a weight on your shoulders, or that you're half embarrassed to be seen like that; I get embarrassed for you out of sympathy! So stand upright and smile! And by personal detail, I mean, if you wear the costume, clean your hair and wear makeup. I am especially looking at some anime people out there. You're imitating animation, for God's sake, make clean lines! Ladies take note: eyeliner, lipliner, and bold colors really improve the look. Especially on a base foundation. I learned this in basic theater, that you have to make makeup so that people in the back row can read your expressions onstage. Same at a convention. I bet it wouldn't hurt you men, either. Dear God, at least shave!

I just get sick of seeing slouchy people who throw on a costume like it was in bed with them when they got up. I don't even know why they bother. You wear a costume to get noticed, so if you are going to be noticed, think deeply about the impact of the whole costume and you in it. I have judged costumes for years, and if it's a choice between a perky costumer who doesn't slouch and did their hair in a half-assed costume versus someone in a technically perfect costume but looks like they'd rather be elsewhere... I am voting for the first one!

One last beef I have is people who have no originality. This is more of a problem in anime cons, but I see them in other cons as well. In any large anime con, I see about 20 - 30 Sailor Moon costumes. For years. I have only seen one Domo Khun costume. I loved it! It wasn't technically great, but the fact the person thought to be original and clever with some brown felt and a carboard box impressed me!

And a final sidenote, I know that some of us can't help how we look. Acne, glasses, weight, chest size, nose, whatever. God made us all different for a reason, so don't be ashamed how you look. I don't mind a fat person in spandex if it looks like THEY don't mind. I saw a costume were a teen girl used her acne as part of her Borg costume. Brilliant! I never notice back acne unless it's on the back of a slouchy person. It's all about attitude, and if you have a terrible attitude, every "flaw" seems more noticeable.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:59 PM EST [Link]

Thursday, October 16, 2003

Odd and Ends

They are finally getting around to fixing the fence in the back. It feels like a long time, but according to my blog, it's been only a little over a month. They aren't done with the fence yet, but they have half of it up anyway. Soon, I won't have to have my doggies on leashes to let them out back to pee.

At work I have been doing nothing but stripping old computers of their parts and building new ones. Our team inherited over 100 computers in various parts of carnage when we moved, and now finally I am getting around to salvaging what we can from them. My small office is stacks halfway to the ceiling with computers. Most of them are old P2-266's to a P3-600 here and there. I salvaged enough parts to build a dual P2-333 server to toy around with. Sadly, most of what these machines were stripped for was RAM and hard drives, so I will probably only be able to make 20 or so machines out of what I can get from 100. Still, that's 20 machines. Most of them will be given to employees to take home and learn Linux. The hard part is all the shells and cases outside my door. Our Internal Computer Team won't take 'em, because they say Building Maintenance is supposed to pick them up. Building Maintenance says ICT is supposed to pick them up. So while they fight it out, I have more and more computer carcasses piling up outside my door like oyster shells outside a Chesapeake restaurant.

I have been working on a joke project that may go nowhere called "Linux for Girls," which will be a Barbie-like knockoff of Knoppix. I am also thinking of having "S.P.Goppix: The Spooky Perky Goth knoppix." They will be nothing more that some stripped down versions of Gnoppix or Knoppix, whichever I can do the easiest, with appropriate themes. So I have been learning ways of making Mac icons into Gnome SVG icons. This also means I'll have more graphics for my site.

Christine will be going to West Virginia this weekend to see an old friend, put flowers on her mother's grave, and take her sister Debbie out. I plan to do some yardwork. Exciting, huh? Zzzzzz...

I got my copy of LIES: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken, and it's hysterical. He really hates Ann Coulter, that's for sure. The subtitle is correct, he really does his research when it comes to seeing if what the conservative representatives say is based on fact. Most of it is not. I have only read about 40 pages into it, but it's already funnier than Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot: And Other Observations, which had me howling with laughter.

Posted by Punkie @ 09:57 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Ghost in the Machine

No, not the album by The Police, but something that has been bugging me at work ever since I started this QA job started in 1999: someone, or something, is screwing with the machines we work with.

I started with International, where we places machines in remote sites around the world. Some places were never any trouble. Some had rampant security problems. In Australia, for instance, some of our testing machines were turned into mirrors of someone's mp3 collections, and often people would install all kind of other software on them. The head of the Australia tech team just blew it off. In Germany, one site had problems were people would use the machine to browse the web. We'd log in through a desktop remote viewing program and watch someone browsing porn on the web. We'd even log it (this was a machine that tested web page speed). "Nein," said the person in charge of the tech center. "We have no records of anyone coming or going out of that locked room." We later found out "records" meant a clipboard with a pen on a nail next to the door, and "locked" meant "in a locked building, behind a door with a lock," that is, the room the machine was in was wide open. "People who enter that room must sign in and out, and no one did, so no one must have gone in there." Uh huh. The activity stopped when we threatened to put in a web cam.

When I was folded into the domestic (US) side of the group, I thought having everything local meant no more of these problems. Wrong. At first, it was just a matter of petty theft. Small things vanishing, like power cords, label makers, RAM, LAN cables, and so on. Part of this was because we were in a lab, we'll call Lab1. Lab1 had restricted access, but by "restricted" it meant "not many employees and all the guards and cleaning staff." While our badge readers are supposed to track who comes in and out, there were "ghostings" where people could just follow behind the person who badged in (there was no guard or even a camera). When our group started locking things in a cabinet, the theft problem stopped. Then weird stuff started to happen to our systems.

How weird? Weird enough to be crafty, and for a while, untraceable. It was done by someone who really was subtle. Like they'd change a crucial configuration file, or unplug random machines (either from the network or the power cord itself). At first, we thought it was just by accident, but then we started to notice that some issues were very specific, like someone KNEW which file to change, and what bit to change from a 1 to a 0, for instance. Many of it was by software we wrote, and only we knew how it worked. This never was released on a grand scale, but obviously by someone testing our security in some way. It worked, because we started locking down stuff with passwords, screen savers, and permissions. Most of these shenanigans dropped sharply in number, and were restricted to hardware only (usually unplugging every other machine in one rack). But then software "issues" began to creep back up.

A lot of it is random. Like someone will change a shortcut in the startup menu that will point to another program, or no program at all. Or they will delete a file, change its CR/LF, or other things that are hard to trace down until you've exhausted all the logical options. This isn't done daily, but usually in bursts of every 2-3 months. Most of it is not really very damaging, but just annoying. The whole thing smells of someone deliberately being prankish because they are bored, or rebellious.

Then we moved to Lab2. Lab2 was bigger, had better security, and much more restricted access. It even has a camera. The pranks stopped when we moved in there, and didn't come back up again until a few months ago, when again, it started back up. It coincided with the time another group we used to share Lab1 with started also using Lab2. I have a pretty good idea who's responsible, but this clown knows that he can do anything with a certain login we use for remote scripts. Yes, I have proof. No, no one cares. But he's not responsible for ALL of it.

So who is? I mean, once you filter out user error (on my part - about 90%), something you didn't expect (like hardware issues - 9%), you have 1% unaccounted for. Someone respells "mount 10.0.10.3" to "muont 10.0.10.3" in a script, puts leading zeros in an IP address, adds one space to the end of a line to change a variable, and you know someone did it because the "date modified" has changed, but the trace login and IP address are masked, and the only way that would happen is if someone was doing it intentionally. Could be him. Could be others. I have no idea. So every few months, something goes down because someone saved a text file as an MS Word .doc format, deleted a log file, or unplugged some LAN cables, inserted paper into the port, and plugged it back in. And I have to put up with it, because the prankster never actually does anything horribly damaging, just stays under the radar as "anonymously annoying."

Then I have to ask why. I can guess it's a boredom issue, or "revenge against the ruling class," or maybe "because I like to mess things up for the sake of messing them up." It's not a personal attack, because it's done to a lot of people in our group, other groups, and beyond. Still, it's unprofessional. Maybe I'll never know the real reason. Maybe it's a life lesson I have to learn from.

It's still annoying.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:32 PM EST [Link]

One Person at a Time

I was reading some stuff on "The Smoking Gun" about rude toll booth employees and the complaints they get. It reminded me of all those years in retail I had, plus the jobs I had where I did tech calls through the phone.

The biggest problem with customer service is many people don't give a damn on either side. On one side, you have some poor soul getting paid very little to do a job with is either monotonous or difficult. Then you have some customers with very poor social skills being mean and nasty for no reason. Both sides erode on decent and polite people on the opposite side. And the problem is getting worse.

For example, say you have a cashier who has a neutral behavior. Nothing wrong with that. Then comes along some asshat who is mad about something else, and takes it out on the cashier. This cashier will probably be taking out THEIR frustrations on the next few customers, no matter how nice they are. Those customers will probably be rude to the next few cashiers they meet, and so on and so on. People tend to remember negative experiences far more than positive ones, and the whole thing grinds down on people, and is hard to turn around. In retail we had a saying that if we make one person happy, they may tell 2-4 of their friends, and probably forget about it within a week. If we make the customer mad, they will tell everyone, possibly 10-20 people, and may remember it for weeks, months, even years. Those friends will tell their friends, and one bad incident suddenly sympathetically pisses off dozens. That's not fair, is it?

But it's true. I see it happen all the time. And this has been devolving for so long, people just don't give a damn anymore. It used to be a bank teller was a professional point of contact that you'd remember. Bill the teller. But now Bill has been replaced by someone who can do the job for the least amount of money. So you get the lower end of the labor force. The lower end is usually a mix of inexperienced people (who get better and instantly leave for better pay elsewhere), people with temporary hiring difficulties (like don't speak English very well yet, but then get better, and also leave), and then there are the rest: a sad assortment of lazy and rude people who think the world owes them something and don't give a damn about anything.

Ever work as a retail manager? I have. I was for many years; most of my retail life. I always did good work, and got promoted pretty quickly. I have also tried to hire people from want ads, career fairs, and walk-ins. Often I had to find halfway decent people from a sad crop of the dregs of social ineptitude. I'd say about 90% of my interviews were over within minutes after they started. Now, to be fair, I did work in sales for two of those jobs, and one of the qualifications was... well, salesmanship: a neat and clean appearance, or at least a nice personality. Uh uh. I got people in bad clothes who sometimes stank who had a bad attitude right from the start. Many didn't want to be hired, but were doing it to please someone else.

Manager: Why do you wish to work with our company?
Applicant: My DAD says I have to GET A JOB... [angry slouch]

True response from my annals of bad interviews (he was also wearing a baseball tee-shirt that had the Metallica "Metal Up Yer Ass" logo on it). That one conversation sums up most of the applicants I rejected within five minutes.

Those that I did hire, I gave them some pretty common-sense training. One of them was teaching them about the cycle of misery: those who reinforce the bad experiences will create more, and everyone will seem to suck. Me? I rarely had "bad" customers. Why? Attitude. Very few people wanted to be mean to me. The meaner they were, the nicer I was. It was a sweet form of "you don't control me!" sort of revenge, yes, but it served me well. Some people just want to yell, and they don't know me, so if they call me a fat four-eyed fuck who should die (and some did), I didn't take it personally. I just tried to solve their problem and make them happy so at the very least they'd go away. But 99% of all customers I ever dealt with were nice, friendly, or at least neutral. After every customer, I'd say to myself, "That was a nice person," or "I enjoyed that call, that was easy to fix." I reinforced the positive. When something went bad, I went, "Oh well," and forgot about it (except if it was REALLY bad, and those were rare).

Some see this technique as "selling out" or even "denial" whereas I saw it as "survival" and "taking pride in my work so when some dolt fires me, at least I knew it wasn't my fault." Of course, then again, I care about people in general. I have this suspicion that most people don't give a damn anymore, and it's just becoming a chain reaction of bad experience upon bad experience. I wish I could stop it, but the best I can do is be a friendly customer myself. I say "please" and "thank you" and tip generously for good service. I don't treat ANYBODY as "beneath me," and I am repulsed by people who do this to wait staff, for instance. I hope, in some way, maybe me being nice will carry over to a few other people and maybe they will be nice to one or more people. Or at least stem the tide a bit.

I wish I could prove to people how being nice improves your life. Even if you are in a sea of asshats and morons, sometimes you get a little extra for not being an ass. And you gain a lot of friends who stick with you for a long time. Friends help out other friends. Soon, you are not alone, but in a raft of better people and positive experience in a sea of difficulty. Some people (like my father) see people as "out to get them" and purposely have no friends to they can jealously clutch their faculties or whatever. They have their right to do that, but you know, what's the point of living, then? We're only on this Earth for a short period, so you might as well make the best of your life to contribute to the greater whole.

And you can do that one person at a time.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:58 AM EST [Link]

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Halloween Delight

Man, I *LOVE* Halloween! This is SO my favorite time of the year! I know I said that before, but now I have some more stuff to look forward to.

This year, we're going to go all-out for the kids in our neighborhood. Well, not as all out as I would have liked, but most 13' tall animatronics are over $8000, not including controllers, and while this guy would look awesome on my front lawn ... where am I going to put him the rest of the year? Maybe he could hold back the neighbor's teetering sycamore from crushing my deck. Okay, the weather would be murder on the latex ... and property values, can you imagine? "Oh, turn left at the gigantic bat zombie horror with torn flesh, and look for the yellow house with the drawn curtain and defensive arrow slits." But what we ARE going to do, is similar to what you see on the right, which is what we did in 2000, when we first moved here. We didn't do this in 2001 because of 9/11 and Christine's busted ankle, and then in 2002 we had this local sniper shooting at everyone. I am praying 2003 is disaster-free.

Assuming it is, and assuming the weather holds, we're doing goody bags this year. When I was growing up, our next-door neighbors, the Van Buskirks, had goody bags. Not many people did, and I can't blame them. I'd say about 100 kids would come to our doors every Halloween. In Reston, they have no street lights and everything is behind tress, and while trick-or-treating is done, it's not easy to navigate dark forested streets wearing a mask. And when we moved here... I'd say trick-or-treating is sadly on the decline. In 2000, we had maybe 25 kids. In 2001, about 5. In 2002 we had almost 20, so I am expecting 20-25 kids. That's not a whole lot. I am spending about $4 a goody bag, which will be special for these kids, who are used to getting the same-old candy everyone else gets. Here's what we have in store:

- One large Milky Way candy bar (full size, not "fun size", so this must be "unbridled ecstasy size")
- One Charms Blow pop
- Two assorted small candies (Hershey's, Reeces, etc.)
- Some Smarties
- One glow-in-the-dark spider ring (tribute to my mother)
- One squeezy horn monster head, because... hey, they are squeezy horn monster heads!
- One liquid glow-in-the-dark bracelet, like you get at raves and concerts.

The last one I got because I have a cheap supplier, and I thought if the kids wear them, it would make them visible to cars. I will open them up and activate them and hand them out one at a time because I am a little concerned unsupervised toddlers might try to eat the goo inside (it's nontoxic, but nasty, and parents may not know that and freak out), and I am also concerned my supplier is SO cheap, they may not all work (they have done this to us before with other items). But doesn't this kick ass? I love kids. I hope they like what they get. All of these (except the bracelet) will be in a string-closed goody bag. Hee hee!

If the weather is workable, we're setting up a small table and comfy chairs in our driveway, under the eaves where the basketball hoop used to be. If it's raining or too cold, we'll set up indoors and meet kids at the door. Christine's going to be in costume. If Sean and Louann brings their kids (where they live, they are isolated, and can't really ToT), I might go trick-or-treating with CR and them, and Louann can stay behind with Christine and our friend Anne (if she shows). If he doesn't, we'll see. CR is 13, I might let him go on by himself, unless he feels like he's too old.

I have high hopes for this Halloween!

Nerd Joke: Only a computer programmer confuses OCT31 for DEC25.

Posted by Punkie @ 10:41 AM EST [Link]

Monday, October 13, 2003

Some site changes...

You might have noticed that we went from 3 days to 1 day, and now we're back to 2. Well... this software seems to print blank main index pages when I have entries set to "one day only." So "two days back" seems to work for now. Thanks to all of you who noticed this and sent me mail.

Also, I got my first bit of "spam comments" the other day. For some Russian nude titty site (it claimed). I deleted it. I guess there will be more of those comments in the future as this site gets more and more popular... like everyone else.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:03 PM EST [Link]

Weekend Wrap-up: It was a dark and stormy night... suddenly a shot rang out...

This weekend was pretty good. I got a lot of house cleaning done, in spite of my complaining ankle. I am now starting to think the ankle thing is related to the weather. I might go to the doctor's again, and try and see what exercises I can do to get strength back in that joint. See, part of the problem is when ONE foot part goes bad, the rest of the body starts to break down because the balance is poorly shifted, so then the other ankle hurts, my hips hurt, my back aches, and so on ... man, I am halfway to Miami at this point. Oy vey, such kvetching from a goy you never heard!

I also got to go through a LOT of my old writings. Most writers that I know have a hard drive filled with writing. I have a lot of beginnings, tons of middles, and even a few ends, but no one cohesive story among them. I don't have anything ready to submit to major magazines or short story collections yet. In 2004, I will be starting in earnest to get back on track. Originally, I was going to go for broke with Tony Bumper, but I decided that I would be better off submitting short stories and articles first, since that worked pretty well for me before. It's also less frustrating when you get "stuck in the middle." Some of the most amusing stuff that also will probably never see the light of day:

- A series of stories I was writing about a portly and awkward Jewish superhero with glasses and curly hair. Some of the scenes were hysterical, and I had some good lines, but the whole idea just became a sort of "so she's not a supermodel, and she's Jewish. So what now?" Uh...
- A story about an early 1800s schoolmaster who was really a space traveler, looking for an assistant. He picks a young redheaded girl who asks too many questions for her won good (back in the 1800s), and he offers the family to "train her at a special school." They say good riddance. He brings her on the spaceship, where she's educated on science, math, space travel and... I did nothing with it. There was too much Dr. Who in it for me, and it got a bit creepy that some older guy wanted a young girl, so I dropped the whole thing.
- A story about people stuck at a science fiction convention caught in an endless time loop. Before I finished this weak piece, I saw an anime film "Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer," and it was so similar, it popped that balloon for good.
- A horror story about a futuristic cop trying to trace a kidnapping, and stumbles upon a "spirit child" that says it is a form of combined souls of hundreds of children. They say that some old European creature has been preying on children for centuries ("Baernwulf"). This creature is almost human, and has the ability to remain in plain sight, yet unseen. This was one of my most promising pieces of horror, but after I took those foster child classes, my heart wasn't in it anymore. There's too much real horror in some children's lives to make stuff up.
- A race of beings who want to do trade with Earth (via strip mining rights of our silicon dioxide), but due to intergalactic rules, Earth has to send a "representative" to the Intergalactic Council to give the alien race rights to be in the solar system. So they rig a plan to kidnap a young scientist, bribe him with technological advances, and have him pose as a "representative of Earth," to be their unknowing patsy. Trouble is, this scientist is disillusioned with the whole human race, and doesn't think humans are worthy to be part of an intergalactic council of any kind. Illusions are shattered on both sides. Hilarity ensues. I might still finish this one.
- In 1991, an old BBS shuts down when the sysop says, "Screw you all if you can't get along." Many years pass to the present. Now old members of this BBS are being murdered. A search for the old sysop starts to try and find a link. Did she murder her old members? Why did she close down the BBS? Did she even exist? I decided not to do this one after "The BBS-shall-not-be-named" did their shenanigans because I feared they would think I was trying to murder them or something. Then the Internet bubble burst, and a lot of the story was too outdated by then.
- A house of odd fannish roommates has to solve a mystery. There's a bitter goth girl and her annoying poser best friend, a crippled technowhiz, an overweight gay primadonna, the token "normal guy," and a basement full of gamers. I got so into the characters, I forgot to write a plot. Oops.
- A series of dialogues between two aliens, posing as humans, stranded on Earth in a social study expedition gone wrong. I only wrote a few dialogues, and there's not plot, really, but two aliens talking about things they have noticed about humans. I posted an example yesterday.
- Adventures of a wizard, and how he rose to become the greatest wizard of all time. This one has been in the vaults for a LONG time. In fact, a lot of it turned into a historical perspective of the history of his world, like how wizardry works, and all the characters that fill it. It's now more of a personal project than anything I'll ever publish. I might post smidgens of the stories here, if anyone's interested.

This only represents larger projects in my plethora of writings. I have a fairly good base, and while a lot of it needs editing for flow, I don't know if any will get published. I think I might start from scratch for a lot of them.

Posted by Punkie @ 10:33 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, October 12, 2003

Story Time - one from the vaults: Conversations of Dennis and Andrew on Human Truth

Years ago, I wrote a series of "dialogues" that never saw the light of day. It was based on two characters, Dennis and Andrew. Dennis was an alien who was sent on a sociological expedition to planet Earth, in the body of a human. Then due to some unforeseen circumstances, was stranded here. After two years of study, Dennis realized that the "Authority" (his rulers) were never coming to get him. In his woe, he met Andrew, also an alien, who had been here longer than anyone Dennis had ever met. They are a bunch of stranded aliens on Earth, trying to mingle in with us as best they could. Dennis and Andrew usually met at a local diner in the middle of the city. Andrew would try and pass on the best survival skills he knew to Dennis. They often had long conversations about humanity, like sex, religion, and the quest for truth. None of these conversations were completed, and I forgot about them until this weekend. One of them was pretty good, and while it never went anywhere, I thought I'd pass along part of it.

Chapter 5: The Truth behind the Truth (c)1998 Grig Larson

Dennis saw Andrew right away, even though the diner was more crowded than usual for a Tuesday night. Outside, it was dark and rain was pouring down. But the diner was dry and warm, and on days like these, Dennis knew why Andrew spent many days here. He sat down in the booth, and ordered some iced tea. Andrew was already halfway through a stack of pancakes.

"Andrew," he started, but Andrew paused him with his hand.

"I like pancakes," he said. "You never get food this good on Homeworld."

Dennis paused. "No, but it's not good for you, either."

"Dennis, have you ever examined the food Authority gave you? I mean, did you ever think about it?"

"Yes, I did. I appreciated the meals provided by--"

Andrew cut him off by waving his fork, "No no, Dennis. That's what they tell you say in rote memorization as a pup. And yes, our food was very well balanced and infused into our bodies through our feeding gills so we'd never have to think about it. But we never enjoyed it, either. We just took it for granted."

Dennis sighed. "I miss those feeding times. Everything was so structured. Back then, when Authority told you something, you knew it was right. You didn't have to think about it, and no one else did, either. You could communicate freely without playing time-wasting games."

Andrew looked up from his glasses. "Something on your mind, Dennis?"

Dennis sighed again, and purged his thoughts onto the table. "Okay, you know I am a product designer at work, right? Well, for the last few weeks, I have been working with a few other humans to try and design this new hair dryer. I designed it so that it would be a perfect fit in the hand, would fit the machinery well, and had a very aesthetic look to it according to what the client said they wanted."

Andrew swallowed another bite of pancakes. "And you were turned down."

"Not turned down per se, Andrew. It's something else that's bothering me. One of the the people I work with is called Dave. Dave is very dedicated to his work, but his ideas are not always the best. Yet he refuses to see that. For instance, he didn't like the grill design I had, but his design would cause the hair dryer to overheat. His design also was unwieldy, and had poor balance. Most of the other people agreed with me. Even the client said that he liked my design the best at two meetings. But on Monday, Dave decided to go with his plan, and he submitted it without asking anyone else. The client was told, by Dave, that there was no other design. The client is not happy, but he did agree to Dave's design."

"Do you get paid more if your design is selected?"

"No, but we are all supposed to be a team. We were told that by our boss, and most of the upper management has said that since I started working there last year. Yet Dave... says things that contradict what is real."

Andrew smirked. "You mean he lies."

"Yes! He knowingly tells falsehoods. I don't know why. But this Monday's lie was the worst of all. He made the client unhappy, he made us unhappy, and when the customers buy that hairdryer, and it is hard to hold and overheats, they will also be unhappy. Doesn't Dave know the long-term consequences towards his decision?"

Andrew smiled. "Yes. But he doesn't care."

Dennis sputtered, "B-but, he's supposed to!"

"He doesn't think so. Look, you have been here for three and a half years. Don't you know humans lie?"

"Yes, but... at least... ugh, I don't know."

Andrew put his fork down. "Tell me, do you always tell the truth?"

"Yes," answered Dennis reflexively.

"How about when you landed here? Did you tell anyone you were an alien?"

"Authority told me it would not be best. They said it would cause an outcast from humans, where I might be killed or locked up for good. But they didn't say lie, Andrew. I mean, no one has ever asked me if I am an alien."

"What if they did?"

Dennis paused uncomfortably. "I... I don't know. I mean, I used to. Or maybe not. Gees, Andrew that's a hard question. We were told as long as we didn't tell anyone, and acted human, even if we made huge mistakes, people just assume you're strange. But they never asked us to purposefully tell a falsehood."

"So being an alien makes you insecure, correct?"

"Well, I think the sixteen months we have been speaking you have make correct assumptions that I was insecure about being here forever."

"Yes, and that is because you told me. You are a good citizen of Homeworld. You tell other citizens what you think, without being destructive. You never had to worry about hurting someone's feeling because essentially, we didn't have any. We never had a motivation to hurt another. Authority made you secure and strong. Now, lack of Authority makes you insecure. You don't know your place in this foreign world."

Dennis nodded. "I know I am not human, but I feel cut off, and the need to be... in with humans..."

"You seek approval. That is what you seek. Like a node cut off from the master control, you are seeking control. Humans have no master control. Some think they do, but since it's not real, or even tangible, they argue what is the master control. Some turn towards others, some turn into themselves. Humans on this planet form complicated clumps of unbalanced authority. Sometimes, the need to structure is so great, they will actually try and shut off anything that disagrees with them."

"You mean fight. Like war."

Andrew nodded. "Yes, but most of it is not that grand of scale. Dave did not punch you, did he?"

"No. No he did not. That would have been out of bounds with our corporate rules."

"And yet he lies? Is lying stated in the corporate rules?"

Dennis thought for a moment. "You know, I don't think it does. I mean, you are told never to lie, but it seems... Andrew, it seems humans lie constantly! But that's against what they preach in religions and television and... almost everywhere!"

"You see the overt messages, Dennis. Not the subversive ones. The media is constantly trying to get people to lie. They say 'tell the truth,' but in many cases, the only people who tell you that have a subversive plan in mind, and they want to be in control!"

Dennis stared at his iced tea. "I don't understand."

Andrew thought for a moment. "Dennis, do you remember the lesson on Homeworld about the iron particles?"

"You mean the ones with the magnets?"

"Yes, that's the one. Remember how all the small bits of iron formed neat lines and rows when the magnet was placed under the table?"

"I recall that. It taught us about polarity, and one of the basic principles of energy and matter."

"Right! Now do you remember playing with the iron particles after the magnet was taken away?"

"Yes. I recall the lines went away."

Andrew swallowed his last bit of pancakes, and pushed the plate aside. "Do you remember how some of the particles remained charged, and clumped together?"

"That wasn't part of the lesson," Dennis balked.

"But you saw it, didn't you?"

"Yes. The instruction process told us that was because the iron particles retained some of the magnetism."

"Yes, exactly! Now hold that thought. This world is filled with people who have no magnet. They did once, or at least their chemical brain thinks they did. Most normal humans grow up with parents who care for them, but many do not. Authority cared for us ever since we were born. Authority was always present, always reassuring. Human parents try their best to be, but they have their own experiences competing with what they were taught later on. Most adult humans are a confused jumble of conflicting thoughts and emotions. That's why they all act so different."

"I always thought it odd that no one had started an Authority."

Andrew smiled, "History is full of attempts, Dennis. Most of them failed miserably. Most were nothing more than the insecure ruling the insecure. One day, some human is going to have the right answer. It hasn't happened yet, or else humans would instantly align themselves towards it. Just like those iron particles to the magnet's force. But right now, we have clumps of people with similar beliefs, but no one force to align them all into a secure structure. There is too much doubt, too many bad experiences. Some most humans have a sort of civility, but only because it is currently in their best interest. Those are the clumps. This city is full of clumps. Most believe that you shouldn't steal or murder people, not because it's wrong, but because they are scared of the risk."

Dennis shook his head. "Wow. It seems like all of human civilization is on the verge of collapse."

"It always has been. Laws are written by the government not because they need to state what's wrong, but because if they didn't it would be chaos. And people follow laws as long as they believe in them. But deep down, no human trusts authority. Their experience shows them that trusting the wrong person, in their search for Authority, has caused them great pain. Most humans are only out for themselves, and those that aren't, face the hardest challenge of all: living in a society where lying is crucial to survival."

"How so? How does lying help? I think it makes things worse!"

"Dennis, it does. But so many people lie so many times, the real truth, the Authority, is essentially meaningless here. So control is kept not by a master force of harmony, but in the self."

"That's their animal side of evolution."

"It is. And it's served them so well. But soon, it will be their end. With no central Authority, they are doomed to many generations of fighting and pain."

"So what does this have to do with lying, Andrew?"

"Easy. Lying is the art of control where there is no Authority. You control another's perceptions for your own gain. Since you are the only one you have to answer to, you kind of have to. Like when you won't tell anyone you're an alien. You depend on that perception, no matter how false, for your survival among the humans. Cut off from Authority, you now have to rely on your inner self to tell you what's right and wrong."

"But I do what the Authority would tell me to do!"

"Yes, but Dennis, you and I and all the other stranded aliens here are alone in that. We clump. Now imagine millions of other clumps, with different Authorities, all having a different message for the same experience, having to work together."

"B-but... there is only one true Authority! On Homeworld!"

"You think that because you were raised that way."

"I think that because it's... it's the truth!"

"Some humans believe that Jesus is their God, and God wrote the Bible. Some think of other Gods. Some insist only on science and repeatable experiments. All believe their way is the truth, Dennis."

Dennis sat and stared incredulously at the table. His whole mind had to take in that others did not know of Homeworld, which although he knew, he never had to think about it before. Suddenly, he understood why humans were so insecure. All of them were cut off from Authority. And none of them had really experienced it, ever. What Dennis took for granted all his life before coming to Earth, no one the people here knew. The warm security, the simple... assumption that everything was set right, and that they were being cared for. All of them. All the time. And every one of the were yearning for it.

"You okay, Dennis? You look shaken. I didn't say this to you to make you upset, I just said this to you to explain why humans do things like lie, cheat, steal, and hurt."

"I am shaken. But I will survive."

"Good to hear. You are a good citizen. Now do you understand why Dave lies?"

Dennis nodded. "I think so. Dave is insecure about his... position. He yearns acceptance, and so tries to secure that by social manipulation through falsehood and ... sheer willpower, I guess."

"What he wants to be true becomes true. Humans have an odd knack of denying truth, even if it is right there, in plain view. They depend on perception, a primitive social need for small clumps."

"S-so... how can I tell if someone is lying?"

Andrew smiled. "You can't."

"I am not encouraged by those words. It simply increases my insecurity."

"Many say you can tell by body language, like touching their face, shrugging, no eye contact, and so on. But that only works if they are saying something they don't really believe. Many humans can fake what they say by simply insisting on believing in them."

"If I were to live a life of lies, I'd be even more insecure!"

"You would, but that's, again, because you care. Many do not. Many find security in hiding beneath dozens of philosophic layers. They call it 'denial,' and in some, it's so complicated, that there is no way for them to tell what's real. They just create their own reality, and poof! It's real. No insecurity, and no one can tell it's a lie, even themselves."

Dennis shook his head. "Gaaah... how am I going to live with these people?"

"Sadly, we weren't meant to. We were sent here to study them and study them I did, because Authority told me to. And you, as well. I do not know why Authority cannot get us back, but since I know Authority does not lie, it must be something Authority did not foresee."

"M.. maybe we're not really stuck here, but Authority keeps us here for a reason." That thought gave Dennis some comfort.

"Thinking like a good citizen, Dennis. I also came to the same conclusion, once I faced I may never leave here. I trust Authority. Other aliens, when cut off, simply could not take it. I don't know what happened to them. Some ran off. Some killed their human form, even though it may mean they life force will never form again as corporal. It's not they didn't trust Authority, it's that they didn't think past it, like we did. We do have to stick together."

"Authority would recommend that," said Dennis, with a smile.

"Authority would. Now, if you excuse me, I have to go home now, since my bus will be here very soon. Please pay for our dinner. You go to your home, and we'll meet again on Friday, in the park. I want to know how you were able to make peace with Dave, and be a citizen of his world."

"Punch him?"

"If decorum requires," said Andrew, with a chuckle. "Your sense of humor is improving. Good. That's your first step in acting human: the sense of irony and resolution of conflict. It is best mixed with trust and lies, but that's another lesson. Good day, Dennis."

"Good day, Andrew," said Dennis, as he paid for their meal at the cash register. He watched Andrew board the bus, and watched the bus drive away in the rain.

Yeah, not exactly my best work, but I have always been fond of this piece. Other pieces included explaining humor, sarcasm, and how money works. Maybe I'll fix those up and post them another day.

Posted by Punkie @ 09:51 PM EST [Link]

Kill Bill (vol 1): A Review

There used to be these theaters in Washington DC that were run down old bijous. They might have once been grand, but poverty and the suburbs slowly bled the audiences out of them. They were anemic, partially boarded up, in areas of town you shouldn't be after dark. The ticket windows was usually manned by some careless skinny man, who handed out tickets to anyone flashing money, including a ten-year old kid. They didn't have much in the way of concessions, except maybe a vending machine with a faulty florescent light. Worn carpeting, evidence of rats, and places where people probably urinated were stains upon the general decay. You'd go into the place, where the metal folding seats were uncomfortable, and bless the darkness because you didn't want to know what those stains were.

These theaters used to show kung-fu flicks, blaxploitation films, and after 10pm, maybe a cult horror and then some porn. The theaters might be big or small, but it didn't matter, they were usually pretty empty. The films never showed on time, either, and it seemed like they just kept playing on a continuous loop. The sound was horrible, and echoed across the room from some tinny speakers. But you didn't some to hear the dialogue, which was badly dubbed anyway, but just the "whoosh" and "slam" sound effects (and for blaxploitation, a huge "BANNGGG" of a gun). You hoped the movie was dubbed, so you got some idea what was going on, but would settle for subtitled if they didn't talk during the fight scenes. There wasn't a lot of talking during these films, but sometimes they were dubbed AND subbed, often dubbed in English, and subbed in Chinese or something. The films were worn and scratched, often missing several feet of film from each reel. Sometimes there were grossly audible audio cues, like a harsh beep. Sometimes, in order to pass whatever rating system these had to go through, the gore was filmed in black and white. The acting was often bad, and the action a tad bit unrealistic, but you didn't care. You went to see some fighting gore.

"Normal" gore was so lame in American cinema. They lacked the edge a lot of these cheesy kung-fu flicks had. Like in some American slasher, you had some guy get cut by a machete and that was it. In a martial arts film, you had some guy who had his eyes slowly poked out by red hot metal tongs. I recall one fight where a guy got his face stuffed in a hornet's nest, and as his swollen, bloody face tried to scream in pain, wasps crawled out of his mouth. He then walked off a cliff, and impaled himself on the edge on an iron gate. Complete with gory, squishy, sound effects. The gore was not only present, but exaggerated and disturbing. There were many unusual ways for the bad guy to die. And I loved it. Later on, local Channel 20 used to show several of these films (notably the less gorier ones, or the gory parts were heavily edited) on Saturday afternoons. As for those theaters? I doubt they are there anymore. A lot of culture left DC in the 1990s, and theaters were the first to go.

Quentin Tarantino must have gone to the same films. Warts and all. I heard rumor he used more stage blood than any film, and that this was in response to his critics who said all his violence was "off screen," kind of like a Greek tragedy ("Just off stage, the main character has been impaled on his sword!"). I must say, he was very true to the original cheesy kung-fu films because a lot of the old, "Oooh!" and "Ugh! Wow..." moments came to me. The violence in the film is heavy and fast, but it's so much more. Tarantino weaves the artistic and sometimes disturbing styles of Lucio Fulci, Chang-Che, Sergio Leone, Kurosawa, Zhang Yimou and Busby Berkeley into an exhibit of remarkable style montage grandeur. The themes of betrayal and revenge come off strong. Every camera shot and scene seems to scream out; non-stop in an artistic melange of adrenaline-filled, 1970s style of kung-fu and spaghetti western films. Yes, the moody western imagery right out of a comic book, the Hong Kong martial arts-action, the influences of the ritualistic samurai swordsmanship, and even Japanese anime (done by the same brilliant artists who did "Ghost in the Shell") are present. There are a tremendous number of in-jokes to those of us who saw these films in the 1970s. This film spoke to me, and stuff I know, but I wonder if it will speak to the rest of the intended audience?

This is gory, western, kabuki film noir at its finest. I loved this film. Even the soundtrack was awesome.

Like all forms of exaggerated cinema, there needs to be some suspension of belief. Luckily, the editing and directing of this film remove most of the feeling of, "Oh, come on now!" Some of the wire work which caused many to criticize "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," is present, but only in a few seconds of a few fight scenes. Of course, this was also a common kung-fu style I remember. I used to remember scenes that were people jumping into trees (filmed backwards of them jumping from them) and wire work so bad, you could see the wires knocking over things. The film is not nearly that bad. There's also the fairly fake backdrops (like Tokyo from the plane), far too much blood spurting out of some wounds, and the inaccuracy of "some wounds kill, the same wound on a main character does not." I'd say that some of the bad guys must have 8-10 gallons of blood in them, spurting like fountains connected to a firehose. There is a lot of gore in this film, and some of it has the "edge" of being disturbing like people with chunks of table leg stuck into their head. But I didn't pause for some of the weaker elements in the story, the film wouldn't let me. It usually made a in-joke about it (like those audio BEEEP noises whenever the main character's real name is spoken) that made you go, "Haha, yeah! I remember those moments in the old films, too! Hee hee!" Even one gore scene is filmed in black and white, and thank goodness for that, because what a lot of red was left behind!

The acting was good. Hell, Uma was GREAT! I mean, I expected an expressionless vigilante from her, but she showed a range of emotion, rage, and ... well, she was just very believable. I felt for her. I felt the need for revenge. The choice in actors was good, too, and the balance of characters was film noir perfect. Chiaki Kuriyama? Excellent pyscho. Julie Dreyfus? Awesome. Lucy Liu? Impeccable! Everyone was good, and played their part to the hilt.

My son is 13. I felt he could handle it, and he loved the film. I wouldn't however, take my toddler to see it, especially because there's several scenes where little kids watch their own parents die in gory splendor. That didn't stop some of the audience goers, though, and I wonder how they are going to explain these scenes to them. "Mommy, do you have a gun in the boxes of cereal?"

Anyway, I know this film won't be for everyone. Some will obviously find it disturbing, and some in-jokes may just look confusing. But I can't wait until February of 2004, when part 2 comes out.

Posted by Punkie @ 09:45 AM EST [Link]

Friday, October 10, 2003

On Revenge

Early on in life, I had learned that revenge was fairly pointless. It rarely came out right, and often just started a counter-revenge loop of some kind. I have seen many, many people try and gain revenge in real life, and it's never like the movies or TV. There's no opponent who vanishes forever, no end of film where you get the girl, and no closing soundtrack. Often the revenge never matches the original crime, and in so many cases revenge just backfires.

For example, I played a trick on someone where I made him look foolish for a short period of time. I was with some friends, and we concocted a plan to fool this manager (at another store in a company I worked for) into believing in an impossible product by just having "random people" (my friends) come in and ask for it. It worked pretty well, and for an hour, I had him going mental trying to figure out why all these people kept coming in for this product. At the end of the hour, I let him in on the joke. Bwah! Nothing big. But he got mad. Apparently REAL mad. I didn't know he could take what I considered a "harmless joke." He thought I was out to make a fool of him, like I had some deeper plan. So he reacted by an even more massive joke, but it was poorly thought out. He convinced me that I sold something used in a murder by first sending in a scary guy to buy the item (a knife), then a few days later, pretended to be the police, stating that I sold what later turned out to be a murder weapon (of a real crime in the papers). I was in trouble now! Trouble was... I didn't know it was a prank. He had no "release," so I let my management know (he didn't tell them), and then I called the police back (not knowing they never called me in the first place), and then when the law got involved (they were desperate for leads on this case, the real murder, I mean), hilarity ensued! When the manager finally let on in a panic it was a joke, he had pissed off our company, pissed of the law, and basically made himself look so stupid that he basically ruined his reputation. He could have ended the prank when he had his friend pretend to be the police with me thinking I sold a murder weapon, and then when I got all scared, said at the end of the call, "Ha ha! Joke! Pbtbththth!" I mean, HOW he pulled the beginning off was GREAT, I mean I had no idea! But he didn't think it through.

I don't get fucked over very much. I think the last big thing was the whole BBS-that-shall-not-be-named thing back in 1998. Before that, in 1992, some meddling wench tried to break up my marriage as an attention getter. Before that... I dunno, people I knew then were in their teens and early 20s, and I can't really hold them to stuff they did back then. But I did learn one of the best, and most valuable lessons ever:

People who fuck you over, like do something really evil ... always fuck themselves over in the end.

You don't have to do a damn thing. It took me a while and a WHOLE lot of patience to come to this conclusion. For example, the girl who tried to break up my marriage by claiming to everyone I wanted to sleep with her, did this to a LOT of people, and soon, had no friends. I also could have gotten counter-revenge with that manager, but why? He was badly burned by his own handiwork. Two companies that fired me because they got someone cheaper were BOTH robbed by the person who replaced me.

I used to think this was magic or karma of some kind. But, really, there's a lot of logic behind this. First off, you should admit you can never control anyone. You can't control what they feel and do, they have to LET you control them. But you can control yourself. So if someone pisses you off, the best thing to do is change what you do when interacting with this person. The most obvious is to back off. Those who take basic Judo know this "You push I pull" type of principle, by letting the energy of your opponent work FOR you, and all you do is redirect the leverage. You can also just assume that you have accepted their behavior. Like I know some of my friends will flake for parties or are make up stories about stuff, but I can plan around that. I don't even get mad anymore, because everyone's got some quirk; no one is perfect. But I feel that way because I changed myself, not them. I have to go on.

Sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes you are fuming because some jackass did something so stupid and selfish, you just want to find them and beat the crap out of them. The most common way this backfires is that the jerk will play the hapless victim. I mean, if they got you fired at work because they were an ass and blamed it on you, and you go to their house and beat the living daylights out of them, you'll feel good only for a short while until the cops arrive. He might even claim he doesn't know you, and that you followed him home to mug him or something. "Save me from that bad man," he'll say, because remember, you already knew he was a liar. Nothing is EVER a liar's fault to a liar. So who are the cops going to believe? Yeah, the guy bleeding all over the carpet. What if you get out of control, and push the guy down the stairs where he breaks his neck and dies? Damn ... now you are in some REAL trouble. But if you just do nothing, maybe you'll feel like your honor has been compromised, or that "he got away with it, the little bastard!" Yes, let him have his victory. Get another job, and move on with your life. That guy is going to get his soon enough because his type of behavior encourages others to harm him. Soon, you'll forget about him, or maybe he'll just be reduced to an anecdote. I can't even remember the names of the guys who bullied me in high school anymore. Most of them grew out of it, moved on, or got expelled. The longer time passes, the less important their actions seem to become. You just have to be patient. Or forgetful.

When I was studying Buddhism, I learned that vengeance itself is a weakness. It represents the unresolved. What the person really wants to the actual memory of the event erased in himself and others. Instead of resolving the conflict from within, they seek to eliminate the evidence that it ever happened. They are being controlled by external forces, which means they have lost control of part of themselves, and an enemy can take advantage of that. If you think about it, we're all manipulated by our weaknesses: fear, uncertainty, doubt, and insecurity. We often give power to things in our life that don't deserve it. I know I do, and I work a lot to try and solve this. Life's too short to worry about vengeance like a character in a Kurosawa film.

Avoiding revenge is one less thing I have to worry about.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:49 AM EST [Link]

Thursday, October 9, 2003

Dear Bitter Watercooler Committee,

"What that's great, that's just fucking great man, now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man...That's it man, game over man, game over, man! Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?" - Hudson, from the movie Aliens

If I hear one more whiny coworker give me that kind of rhetoric, I am going to bash some heads in. Yes, I know the market is bad, and yes, I know that our company is cutting costs, and yes I *know* we could be fired or laid off for no reason at all without any notice whatsoever. I know that. I see that. I saw that twice last month! So for the love of God, will you stop repeating it like it's breaking news. I have woken up, I have smelled the coffee, and I fully realize that without a job, I am screwed. I know my income would plummet, I'd lose my house, and be without work probably for several years and they go back to starving like I did in 1991-1993. I realize that the company is shoveling bullshit to us, does not care about us, will probably give us crummy raises if we get raises at all, and by the way, did I mention I know we could be fired or laid off for any reason, just to save money?

You know what? Welcome to the real world, folks. I have been dealing with this since 1987. I was fired and replaced once because my boss thought that hiring a prisoner in a halfway house would save him money. I got no severance. No "sorry to see you go," but office politics and social security fraud (they took it from my paycheck, but never claimed it on my W2's). I got laid off another time because the district manager thought he'd save money by firing everyone and rehiring new people at minimum wage. His new spreadsheet program told him it would work. The praise of being top salesman of the chain gave me nothing but vapor memories only I recalled. I even once rose to the top of my team, changed how the did things, made the office a LOT more efficient, got praise, awards, and just before my next review, you know what? They outsourced my whole department to cheaper people in Tucson and I was out of a job. Boo hoo me.

None of this is new to me.

So shut the hell up. I am going to do my job, to the best of my abilities, and do it well. Yes, I realize that my extra hours will be worthless when I am laid off. No one will care and remember my accomplishments except if I back them up on a resume reference. I am fully cognizant of that. I fully realize that the projects I worry about right now will be long forgotten by everyone, including me, in five years. I realize that policies come and go with the tides of new management. We did it one way, now we do it another. Oh, and next year, we'll do it another way. It may be right, it may be wrong, but I have no choice. This is SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, people. Get off your panicking high-horse like you're alerting me to some serious new danger. Stop being a lawn sprinkler of bitterness in my work life, because in the end, you won't get points for being right about your pessimism.

I know. I spent many years being a pessimist and I got no credit for being right. What a waste of time. All I did was worry and cause others to panic. Doom and gloom never improved anything. What I did learn was to have a careful escape plan. That's why I am no longer in retail, that why I take training even if I fail the exam, and that's why I still plan on being a writer. It's a balance of long term and short term, and doom and gloom still have no place in that. Am I cheerful? No. I am scared, too, but I take my fear and try and make something useful out of it. I save money. I learn new skills, and keep the old ones in tune. I remember that the most long term concern I have is my family and friends. That's not senseless optimism, that's common sense.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:47 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, October 8, 2003

On theivery...

A long time ago (1985 or so), I was with a friend at Tower Records in DC. When I got there, I was asked to leave my coat and backpack in the front. In exchange for this, I got a 45 record spindle adapter with a number on it; the theory being when I went back, I would hand it over and get my stuff back.

But I didn't. I got my jacket back. Not my backpack. I told the (now different) person behind the counter I had both a jacket and a backpack, and his response was a "sorry, that's all I have." We called the manager. Long story short: I was minus one backpack. Okay, truthfully, I was minus one backpack and the stuff in it, which really was only a few pens, a notebook (with old schoolwork), some junk pieces of paper, and maybe a broken plastic ruler. Oh, and some food I bought earlier to snack on. My wallet was actually in my pocket, so that was a relief. But I was still pissed. I have never gone back there ever since, and when someone takes by stuff to put it "behind the counter" I usually leave the store. I realize this might make me look like a shoplifter, but I don't know the person behind the counter well enough to just hand over my possessions. I hope whomever stole my backpack got run over by a truck and his carcass eaten by wolves, which I realize are not likely to roam in downtown DC, but I can't just picture the roadkill sitting near the Metro station there without picturing the ultimate humility of being eaten by hungry wolves. "What are the odds of that?" asks the ghostly form over his chewed-up former torso.

So. Why did I bring this up, other than I am bored and frustrated at work, reading threads on a computer board? Because those threads asked about shoplifting, and made me realize, again, that I have never stolen from a store... ever. I used to think this was normal until I got older, and people in groups would confess stuff they nicked, and never believe me when I said I never had. "Even as a kid?" No. "Sure..." they say, with a lilt in their voice like I thought I was still being hunted by guards at People's Drug and Pharmacy, but should at least admit my humble failings to a close circle of friends.

Have I stolen? Yes. Oddly enough, by stores I worked at. Nothing major, really. I mean, the best opportunity I could have gotten was working at Chesapeake Knife and Tool, where a $400 knife could have fit into my sock. When I worked at Crown Books, I got free books anyway (I just exchanged the ones I didn't want with ones I did), and when you can't exactly steal Cargo Furniture out of your own showroom without a significant gaping hole to account for. But at CK&T, I stayed honest. Boring, but honest. I could have easily faked inventory and stole a whole lot of stuff without someone noticing. Someone did eventually try that. He was the guy they hired to replace me (he was cheap), and months after I was laid off, the guy stole all our account numbers, and placed large orders to a temporary address. Sadly for him, though, the knife industry is less corporate, and suddenly my former employer got calls from dealers going, "This address isn't yours... is it? Some guy claiming they're opening a new store, but that sounds awfully fishy..." Even huge knife companies have only a handful of employees, and everyone seems to know everyone else. So the butthead was set up in a sting operation, but he must have gotten wind of it because he never picked up anything. So things like that keep me honest. I always figure there's an angle I didn't see, and I'll never get away with it.

Well, I did nick some Cargo. I confess. Most of it was stuff that... well, it was how they did their bookkeeping. Suppose I got a lamp for $100 retail. My cost was probably $40. Then the lamp gets discontinued, and goes on sale. They had this weird rule about how things depreciate. If I sold the lamp in its prime, I made back my $40 plus $60 profit (part of which goes into my annual store bonus). Until it depreciated. Then it was worth less, but because of their odd rules, they marked down your cost price along with the sale price, but you still paid back what it was origianlly worth. So now the lamp is discontinued, and after one year, it's depreciated at $20, and selling retail for $60. So when you sold it, you "lost" $40. I claimed, "but if you sell it at $60, you made back the $40 on cost, plus a $20 profit!" Not according to them. Now if you had something YEARS after it was discontinued, it was worth almost nothing when you sold it. So even though your store sold an old table for $200, because it origianlly cost you $200, you lost $200 because it was recorded as a "zero item." I have been told by accountants this is normal proceducre with depreciation, and done for tax reasons. Only one store was immune to this, and that was our "scratch and dent" store in Potomac Mills. So what a lot of managers did was "sell" their old stuff at a slight loss to Potomac Mills, which acted as a transfer of close-to-same-cost on paper. Thus you offloaded your stuff to Lacsetta at Potomac Mills, she made a ton of money on paper, and made huge bonuses every year. You kept some of your bonus that you would have lost if you held onto the item for too long. So what happened if Lacsetta didn't take it? Hmmm... under these laws, you never suffered a loss until the date of sale. What if the sale never occured? Most of our showrooms were too small to handle old furniture piling up so... let's put it this way. My district manager told me one day if I didn't get rid of all these items in my showroom, I was to throw them away. And tell no one. Hello coffee table! Hello fake potted trees! I also got a mirror because a customer never picked it up, even though it was paid for. They just vanished off the face of the earth. And before inventory (under these rules, if you had MORE items than you bought, you were back-charged, which was a whole 'nother mess) it ended up in my home. Sound confusing? It doesn't make sense until you see the balance sheets we did every year.

So. Then there was the bunk bed. Our company built a lot of its furnutre from modular parts that our drivers assembled in your home while you waited. Sometimes these parts were warped or chipped, so the drivers had spares of all the parts in all their delivery trucks. Over time, these started to accumulate, and apparently, no one was keeping good track of them. One driver said, "we just grab us a bunch of bed rails and other spare parts before we head on out, and no one counts 'em." So one day, I saved two driver's asses.... big time. I covered up a huge mistake they made by convincing the customer that everything would be all right. The story is too long for this already long entry (how long does it take a database to build?), but suffice to say I stuck my neck on the line for drivers I knew would do the same, and ended up REALLY sticking my neck on the line before I knew just how bad things had gotten with the order. Long story short: we fixed it by enlisting the help of another store. The drivers gushed thanks, because if I blew them off, they'd have to work the weekend. So they said if I wanted anything... just name it. I said, "Naw, that's okay," but the drivers were good ol' boys from Chase City, Virginia, and good ol' boys repay their debts! One driver said that he had enough unlisted spare parts to make a whole upper bunk... and just sitting in the back of his truck...

My son still sleeps in the bunk to this day.

So, I guess that was a form of stealing.

Posted by Punkie @ 08:41 PM EST [Link]

Small tribute to Larry going home

In our building, we have a cafeteria, run by Sodexho/Marriot. It's a generic place, with a grill, salad bar, and some main courses. Not as fancy as our main campus, but it's better than nothing.

At a previous tech job, we were in a building with a convenience store/cafe that only ran from 9am to 4pm. This sucked because my hours were 3pm - midnight. Then I got a job where I worked days, but then the cafe went out of business. The manager told us it wasn't so much a money issue as a staffing issue. She owned a series of shops like this, and this particular one she couldn't get reliable employees, and it was too much of a hassle. So she closed it. So now we had to go down the road a little ways to get snacks.

When I started work here, my shift was midnight to noon, over a weekend, so I didn't go to the cafeteria very much. When I got to work, it was closed, and when I left, I wanted to just go home. Well, then my jobs changed, and I became a regular at this place. It was ... not the best. It wasn't bad, but it's not special, either. The staff was a manager named Jennifer, a chef named Larry, and a whole lot of Hispanic help, Rosa, Franchesca, Linda, and a few other people. But I grew accustomed to it. It was better than going out, losing your parking space, and having to deal with lunch traffic.

Larry was a character. He struck me as a guy who had an alcohol problem, although he never appeared to be drunk at work. He was a bit disheveled; his clothes were clean but rumpled. He spoke without much eye contact, and all his moves looked like a tired machine going through its paces. He would speak if spoken to, and did have interesting stories about his Louisiana heritage, including New Orleans and the Bayou. He loved to talk about food and French cooking. He was friendly enough, but always looked pained and stared off into the distance like he was watching some faraway memory. His slight smile would turn to a smirk when you mentioned some of New Orleans. "Cafe DuMonde," he said, "is the only place to get a good benignet." His food was always spicy, and while it wasn't bad, almost everything was the same. It's hard to pin down, because the dishes he made were different from day to day, but they all had the same ... flavor, almost. Well, they had character like him. Even his Chinese dishes had a Cajun flavor.

There was one girl named Rosa who always looked pissed off. She spoke enough English to argue "des now wha you say, you say you wan des!" After a while, she got your order right, unless it differed from the menu (like "no mayo, please"). She manned the grill, and looked like at any moment she would just say "fuck it!" and walk off. No eye contact, and an attitude like the fact you were there was just one more thing wrong with her life. You got used to her, and I was always friendly to her, but it was uncomfortable to see people not used to her go, "No, no... I asked for the fish sandwich, not a hamburger." I watched one guy speak to her in Spanish, and I almost laughed, because the look of "How DARE you" flashed across her eyes, like the guy dared to talk down to her in her own language.

Like I said, nothing special, and I got used to it. Well, a few weeks ago, the food radically changed. Larry was gone, and some bug-eyed guy with a mustache was in his place. Sometimes Larry went on vacation, but apparently, he was fired. All character that barely existed in this tenuous environment was gone. Suddenly everything was as vanilla and white bread as a Slim-fast TV dinner. And the prices went up. I used to get a decent meal there for $5, but now I pay $8 for less food. Bland food.

This just adds to the bleeding of character this company has gone though over the past few years. What used to be a pretty fun place to work has soured. People seem more angry, less caring. But one thing was certain: when Larry was gone, the cafeteria easily lost a third of its patrons. I spoke with Jennifer at our main campus, and she told me that they fired her and Larry, plus two coworkers to keep costs down. The chef there was a "chef-manager," and she told me that yes, it's true, people have really stopped eating there as much. She didn't have anything else to offer but, "Yeah, you're right. Sodexho made the decision."

I hope Larry went back to Louisiana. I picture him packing up his things, tossing them into an old station wagon, and driving down Interstate 59 through Tennessee and Alabama, facing the setting sun, knowing he was finally going back home. Back home to the Bayou.

We miss you, Larry. God speed.

Posted by Punkie @ 03:35 PM EST [Link]

Managing anger pisses me off...

I never could manage anger very well. I used to have this default process that simply folded all anger into a serious form of depression. If I got upset at something, I'd just go into a zombie-like state, swimming in a black vacuum of nothingness where my hate and rage would ravage my body and mind until it finally dissipated. This is not a good idea, really, but when the whole world is against you like I thought it was as a kid, it kept me alive. Sometimes when I think about the crap I put up with, I want to go, "Why didn't you fight back? Tell them to go to hell!" Of course, hindsight isn't always 20/20, but I help my focus by going, "Well, realistically, what if you did fight back? You'd be dead."

It's true. It seems dramatic, but I could easily see my father beating me literally to death. He came close once. He had me on the ground and kept kicking me in the chest until I couldn't breathe. I was coughing spots of blood for days. There was more to this story (I don't want to go into it right now), but the summary is it was over some schoolwork thing, and I talked back to him. I had been attacked by bullies at school a lot before, and I discovered that most bullies, once you're down, stop attacking you. My father didn't. He was a separate kind of evil.

So the "hold all rage inside, no matter what the damage" was better than "let it out, and get killed." I am glad I can't go back in time, knowing what I know now because I'd be dead in a week. I'd certainly be expelled from school for mocking authority at the very least. "Oh, you don't really need to know this... I mean, 90% of adults don't know it either and they get along fine," I could see myself saying. I totally wouldn't respect authority. I don't now, unless they prove themselves to be reliable. Bullies? Now I know all it takes is a few fights, even if you lose them, to get them off your back. The trick is, if you are going to lose them, at least initiate the fight or cause damage. Since I know most of the kids that bullied me vanished as background noise in society, I'd... probably see no harm in permanently scarring them. In the face. But I know all bullies are cowards, and some of them were at the peak of their popularity as jocks, so if I gouged one of their eyes out, they'd be the victim REAL quick and I'd be in Juvenile Prison. My old friend Kate used to do this "crazy act" that got people to stop bullying her, but she knew when to hold back. I wouldn't. I'd get drunk with the power, and say all KINDS of crap to mess the adults up, and I know now that when adults don't know what to do with a kid ... they shuttle them off where they don't have to deal with them. Even if they have to lie. You could be a peaceful Buddhist that never harmed a fly, but if they can't deal with it, they'll claim you are on drugs, and whoooosh! Off to the drug clinic rubbish heap you go. So ... again, being the passive victim paid off back then.

Of course, after age 15, when the courts forced my father to stop abusing me, I got therapy, friends, and then later a great life... I got cocky. My level of tolerance dropped as I didn't need that room anymore. Before, I could easily go, "Oh, I don't matter. No one likes me." I can't do that now. When I get dissed or annoyed, I get pissed off. If I get pissed off enough, I get angry.

And here lies a big problem. I... never learned how to deal with anger. I have the temper of someone probably about 4 or 5 years old. People who had a supportive as a kid probably learned how to deal with anger far better than I do. To me, it's like a foreign element that roars through my head and messes up things. I am unable to focus, and the alliance I forged between all my levels of consciousness starts to fall apart at the seams. There's the Id, wanting to rid itself of pain, the Ego, wanting to inflict pain, and the Superego trying to work with the Ego to rationalize the energy into something more productive. For a while, I was able to just throw myself into some exhausting physical task, like yardwork, housework, or whatever. But recently, with all the rainy weather, bad back, and bad ankle... I don't have these outlets. So I start to fume. My temper because short as all this energy gets backlogged. And years of training has closed off the usual depressive avenues of release: self-inflicted wounds, burning self-hatred, and being all zombified. I don't want to be a zombie, it's boring! I don't want to be depressed, I have nothing to really be depressed about! I don't want to inflict pain, what if it gets infected or I damage my body for good? What in God's name do normal people do?

Punch pillows? Pfuh. I punched out a dresser a few months ago. That was much more satisfying, but for a while I thought I broke my wrist because it swelled up like a grapefruit. Besides, I need that dresser for my clothes. Punch a person? Hah! I mean, even if I totally ignored assault laws (and the crippling guilt that would follow), the worst thing about hitting a person or an animal is their tendency to move out of the way, and they I'd get even more frustrated that I missed. Oh, and some punch back, so that's a waste of time and energy; it only makes the problem worse. At least a pillow stays still. So does a monitor, which I punched so hard a month ago, it stopped working (I didn't like it anyway) and I have a deep knot of scar tissue on one of my knuckles. I smashed a large wooden spoon to splinters on my head to release some rage a few weeks ago. To splinters. Now, I liked that bamboo spoon, so I am starting to see a problem. Logic? Okay, sure. Try and tell a toddler to stop crying because he's not being reasonable. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Back? Okay, now maybe you see what I am up against. But as an adult, I can't run around screaming with snot and tears running down my face, punching stuff that doesn't work. I use the same methods to calm myself I'd use on a toddler, too, like giving myself a cookie or buying a new toy. That only goes so far, as you'd know if you were a parent of a toddler in a rage loop, or actually have extended your finances to the point you start skipping meals to save money. Sometimes, toddlers just have to sort it out themselves, although too much of that leads to ... my problem. Some may have thought of comforting a raging toddler by holding him and rocking back and forth. Well, I have no parents to do that, and never had, which, yes, I realize might be a stem issue here. But whatever the reason, the best I have are friends who listen to me rant and rage, but if I do that too much, I'll drive them away.

Recently, it came to my attention that I complain too much. No one said this to me, but as I was looking at my diary here, some posts I made on a board, and posts I wanted to put on my diary but didn't... I realized that I was getting into a self-reinforcing loop. "How are you doing?" a friend would ask. "Well, it all started when I woke up and..." There's only so much you can dump on a friend, and most of my bitching and kvetching is petty, anyway. This diary has been more valuable to me that I realized as a self-objective tool in this case. But when I try and not complain, I end up swallowing all the frustration and desire to tell people off, and it just builds and builds. This is no good, either. I can only write so much online because, well, some stuff are better left kept secret. Like if I am mad at some ass at work for being said ass, it could get back to the ass, and then all hell would break loose. I could lose my job, a few friends, and my problems would be even worse. I once had an entry called "The Help Desk Whore" about a girl I used to work with who slept with managers, took their money, and left them, resulting in managers of departments hating our whole desk for months because "she" was still with us. But I closed it soon after I posted it because a coworker said, "Uh... she may no longer be working with us, but that could get ugly if your former boss saw it..." This diary cannot be a venue for speculative gossip, even though I'd love to get some work crap off my chest, a few con politics, and some friends who are being buttheads about their life choices, and somehow I think I am a judge of that.

But writing this entry helped. I hope it helps someone else, too.

Now back to mysql server and ... whatiia mean "/usr/bin/mysqladmin" does not exist??? Where did it go??? WTF??? ARRRRGGHHHH! [shatter]

Posted by Punkie @ 11:52 AM EST [Link]

Tuesday, October 7, 2003

Stupid Meetings

I hate meetings. I mean, I like them if they are productive or have information I need or might find useful, but I get called into so many meetings where I am wasting my time at work. I am in a teleconference with one now. Mass meetings here have several flaws that I see:

- They set a start time, but never an end time. This makes them very hard to plan around, and sometimes when the meeting just goes on and on and on and on ... you have no sense of hope, no goal to say, "Only 30 more minutes, I can stand that." No, it could go on for another 5, 10, 30, or even hours!
- No agenda. You can't also look forward to "Only one more presentation to go..." because there's no order other than "you are before Bill and Sue is after you..." which means you know you are in the middle of stuff, but not how long you actually have. By the time they get to the last guy, that poor guy is working with a very bored audience.
- Some people can't present. They could be the BEST managers, but the WORST speakers. Common crimes are people who get off topic, repeat themselves, get snagged by audience questions, repeat themselves, or are just dull and boring presenters. Who repeat themselves. :) I guess I can't blame people for that, it's not easy to get in front of a few hundred people and be interesting. But can't they at least be brief?
- Some speakers never answer your questions, like they don't listen to your question. For instance:

Questioner: I have a question about the toaster. My toast is getting burnt. Is there a way to select the darkness on a toaster?
Speaker: What kind of bread are you using?
Questioner: Any bread. It burns any bread.
Speaker: Does wheat give you a stomach ache?
Questioner: Uh... I didn't say I didn't like wheat. Is there a way to select the darkness on the toaster?
Speaker: Do you wiggle the plug?
Questioner: No, no I don't. Are you saying there is no way to select the darkness?
Speaker: Maybe I don't understand your problem. Is the place that is selling you your bread giving you problems?
Questioner: No. No. I just want to know if you can select the darkness of your toast!
Speaker: We have a contract with the toaster company to make sure toast comes out well. Do you feel the vendor is at fault?
Questioner: NO! LISTEN TO ME! IS. THERE. A. WAY. TO. SELECT. DARKNESS????
Speaker: I like pie.
Questioner: AAAARRGGGG!!!

- Some speakers are just totally ignorant that people are listening in on conference calls. They speak away from the microphone, or speak very softly. After reminding them to speak up about 50 times, the listener just gives up.
- Some people just snag speakers with constant, incessant questions, dragging the presentation on way past the point of being useful. Maybe they just like the attention.
- People on the conference call making noise. This is TERRIBLE in my company. For the years that I have been here, I have suffered through people who wouldn't know a mute button from their own ass. Often the crimes range from people placing the microphone next to their keyboard or computer speaker to actually forgetting they have the phone on at all, and wandering around on their wireless outside, having conversations, or worse: the bathroom. And these people are often the same ones who don't listen when someone calls for them.

"As I was saying, on slide 34 you see that the connectivity rate went down by 0.04% as compared to [BRIIING! YOU'VE GOT MAIL!] ... compared to last week's chart that showed [KLICKA KLICKA KLICKITTY KLICKA KLICKITTY KLICKA KLICKA KLICKITTY KLICKA BRIIING!]... uh, last week's chart that showed a 0.02% increase over the previous [RING RING.... RING RING... HELLO? YEAH. OH NOTHING, WHAT'S UP? YEAH!] ... previous ... hey, can someone on the teleconference who is making a call please [NO WAY! ARE YOU SERIOUS! WAYNE GRETSKY IS WAY BETTER THAT HIM!] ... please? Please can whomever [SO JANET AND I ARE THINKING ABOUT TRADING IN THE OLD BEEMER FOR A NAVIGATOR BUT I DON'T KNOW IF OUR PARKING GARAGE HAS THE CLEARANCE!] ... please? Hello? Caller? [ I DON'T KNOW! LET ME CHECK THE WEBSITE! KLICKA KLICKA KLICKITTY KLICKA KLICKITTY KLICKA KLICKA KLICKITTY KLICKA] Caller? SHUT UP! [NO, IT'S LIKE 6' 2" AND THE GARAGE IS 6' 5" SO THAT ONLY GIVES THREE INCHES FOR THE XM SATELLITE ANTENNA]"

Today's insanity was someone on a wireless headset in a warehouse. You kept hearing echoes of voices, the fading in and out of static, conversations, and music whenever he got near someone's radio. Gaaaah!

Posted by Punkie @ 04:37 PM EST [Link]

Some random small thoughts...

Due to the volume this diary is getting, I am shortening it to one day only on the main index page. It was 5 days for a while, then 3... but now my entries are getting so wordy that the man index is getting a little too big for my dial-up friends. So I am shortening it to 1 day. This means those who only read it less than once a day might miss some entries. If you care... I have archives! :)

On the Jewish note: I think my friend Albedo turned me onto this about 4 or 5 years ago. It's Rabbi Zelig Pliskin's Daily Lift. It's always full of good advice, even if you aren't Jewish. Today's was pause for thought: Rabbi Yitzhak Meltzin never got angry with another person. If someone insulted him, he always ignored it. He said, "It is wrong to insult someone, and if this person insulted me it is because he lacks the necessary understanding. So why should I be angry at someone for his ignorance?" I am wondering about this. What if you're an ass and don't know it? But generally, this is a good way to diffuse insults. I learned this in customer service: never take insults personally, the customer doesn't know you. Try and find the real problem and fix that instead of worrying about what they just called you or accused you of.

I get about 150-200 pieces of spam on my Yahoo account daily. Daily. This sucks. Yahoo is really good about filtering out 95% of it to my "Bulk mail folder," but sadly, it has a lot more false positives than I am comfortable with. The problem really got bad within months of my e-mail being posted on the Katsucon site. Before that, it was only 5-10 pieces a day. I didn't even use the bulk folder back then. Now I couldn't survive without it. I hope spammers all get a mouth full of cancer, I really hate them, I do.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:45 PM EST [Link]

Hearing from an old friend...

I just a letter from an old friend of mine. Actually, she started out as an assistant of mine at a former job. She was the best assistant of anything I ever worked with. Perky, chipper, and ... well, I couldn't help but compare her to Marlo Thomas in the old sitcom, "That Girl." Her name is Ellen Reif.

Ellen left my company to pursue her dream work as an actress/playwirght in New York City. Yeah, I know, like 500 other people who get off at the Port Authority bus terminal daily. But I knew something was special about Ellen. She wasn't some spoiled brat who wanted to be an actress for attention. She didn't have this illusion of stardom. She just wanted to work. My friend Eden, who also went to New York City, had a similar dream to be a costumer. I knew both of these girls had enough chutzpah to do what they could do to succeed, not matter what the odds.

Someone saw my diary entry about Ellen, and asked about a play she had written. I figured, I hadn't spoken to Ellen in a while, so I looked her up. I couldn't believe she still lived in the same place she moved to, but then again, I am not sure what "rent controlled" really means, which is how many of my New York pals describe living sometimes. I also couldn't believe I hadn't spoken to her since 1995. Yeesh. Some friend *I* am! But it was super to hear from her again.

Two things stuck in my mind about her letters. One, she is pretty much a success, although those who think being an actress is all glitz and champagne would think, "Man, she has to work to SUPPORT her acting?" Uh, yes. Like 99% of all successful actors, she does. Only 1% get the Hollywood dream, which for many is not their goal. She works during the day, leading a "double life," as she joked, a professional by day and does her acting and writing at night. People like Ellen are inspiring to me. She set out to do something she loved, and she did it! My friends Eden and Neal also did the same thing with Broadway costuming and linguistics.

The second, and more scary thing, was this story: Then my entire world was turned upside down - September 11th happened and my office blew up. My office in 2001 was on 70th Floor, I had a 9:00 meeting and arrived at the Trade Center at 8:50 I was in the concourse (the first plane had already hit) and the Port Authority evacuated us one-by-one onto the street. That's how it starts. It still amazes me, but Ellen is the friend I had closest to the actual event. Most of my friends in the Pentagon were away for training, off shift, or just happened to be away that day. Eden was downtown, I believe. One of her good friends' stepfather was on the plane that hit the Pentagon (also had a friend who three of his coworkers at Mitre died on that same flight). I wasn't prepared for that, for some reason. I recall going cold reading her story. Parts of that event still affect me, and I am not sure why. I was sitting in a windowless friggin' office that day, far away from anything. But today, after reading her letter, I am sitting in a (different) windowless office, and when a plane flew low over my building (which happens a few times a day), I swear my panic level rose. Man, I have to get a grip.

Anyway, it was good to hear from her again. She's one of the reasons I want to go to New York City (and Eden, and Merideth, and Vinnie, and Martha, and the rest of youse guys ... honest, I am trying to make my way up there...).

Posted by Punkie @ 11:13 AM EST [Link]

Monday, October 6, 2003

On tee-shirts and the people who control too much...

Where I work, we had this big party recently to celebrate a milestone. And if you got in early, you got to participate in some ad. We all had to dress up in rain slickers, and form a huge shape on the company's front lawn. A camera on a crane filmed us from there.

The guy who was directing us was a snot. First of all, I didn't want to be in some promotional spot, but I was offered little choice. The same went for a lot of people. The guy who was directing us reminded me of some really bad rave deejay. He had a poorly faked British accent, a patronizing attitude, and thought he was popular and funny. Several times he made fun of us, but not in a good, funny "Don Rickles" or "Triumph the Insult Comic Dog" sort of way. If you are going to be an insult comic, you should at least have the balls to go all the way, not use it to get people to do what you want them to do. So his sneer was probably genuine: he acted like he really openly hated us. "Come on you idiots," he said, "I know you never leave your desks, but try and remember how to walk backwards ... you did learn when you were in kindergarten, didn't you?" He said this is a long, drawn, fake accent like he was half joking, half angry at us. Needless to say, a lot of us got pretty mad. Especially when he made some joke about overweight people (which I was talking to a friend when he made the comment, so I don't know what he actually said that made the crowd boo, but I did hear him say off-mike that chubby computer people sure are cranky). He also got upset that we weren't "staying within the lines," the "lines" being small yellow pennant that outlined the shape of the logo we had to stay in. "Come on, stay within the lines, people! You learned this in grade school...!"

Did I mention "walk backwards?" I did. See, the vision of this director was to make us fill a shape (our logo), and then we'd walk backwards, slowly, towards a narrow exit. He wanted to play the film backwards, so it would look like we all spilled out from a bottle and made the logo. The fact that there was about 1000 of us piled on a lawn, walking backwards, towards a narrow exit, in hot rainwear on a sunny day, already mad at the director who had called us "empty headed" by this point, and we did NOT fall down and trample people is a feat in itself. Of course, half of us turned around and started walking forwards because we were fed up at this point. This made the director angry because it "rew-winned the shawt." But we didn't care. The party started serving beer and picnic food. People were here to get smashed.

And get tee-shirts.

There's this "thing" in our company about tee-shirts. You have to get them. It's like a milestone of how long you have lasted, sort of like a badge you get for combat duty. And with the recent layoffs, the people were getting ugly and greedy. It's really become a "everyone for themselves!" kind of mentality here, lately. This picnic was probably the most bitter and ugly event I have ever attended for this company. You'd think free beer, ice cream, hamburgers, and such would have placated us. But no. And when they set up the tent for tee-shirts, they took forever to give them out.

I had to get back to work because I had a guy from Sprint in my computer room fixing a problem it took us weeks to track down, and I wanted to get back before he left (to make sure it really was fixed). I wanted my tee-shirt, and so did the guy who gave me a lift to the main office (who also had to get back to monitor something). The whole event is run by "corporate events," which are a bunch of people who strike me as the type who thought of themselves as popular in high school. They are preppy, perky, and all white bread. The young Slim Fast model who was running the tee-shirt tent was a control freak. In addition to having way too much makeup that even a preteen at a pajama would say was overdone, she was a patronizing style of lip service who just HAD to do things her way. "Her way" was that when we got a tee-shirt, we had to sign it out, and then get our hand stamped so we didn't go back for seconds. Okay, folks, we're not giving out PDAs here, these are tee-shirts. They have no value on the open market (even thrift stores won't take logo tees). But the delay was that she could not find the ink to the hand stamps. The crowd was staring to swarm the tent, asking for shirts. And she wouldn't give them. So the guy I was with is the brother of a bigwig in our company. He went and got the president of the company to come down and let us have shirts. I think this was a bit overboard, but I got caught up in the moment, and didn't stop him. I watched the president of the company and the girl in charge of shirts get into an argument. "Give them their shirts, Brittany!" (not her real name, but this one fits better). She stood fast, "Mr. President, I can't find my ink! If I give those two shirts, I have to give them to everybody!" People were chanting to give out the shirts, and she was in danger of a full scale riot, if you ask me.

This was damn funny. She honestly could not see what she was doing wrong.

To make a long story short (too late), the president opened a box and gave us our shirts so we could get back to work. Of course, when you are a size over an XXL, you often find "one size fits all" or even "one size fits most" means "won't fit you, freakshow!" Our company is fairly good about this, but this was the first time when XL and below got better shirts than the throngs of XXL and up. The people XL and smaller got some nice blue denim shirt, and all the fat and tall mutants got white cotton tees that had the kind of thin fabric seen only during wet tee-shirt contests. I didn't complain, really, because I was afraid my coworker started a war (or at least a riot), the president would ban shirts, and that we'd get memos about it. Luckily, this did not happen.

After that, we left, but I heard the president said to give everyone a shirt, who cares if people take seconds? No one got signed in a clipboard, and no one had their hand stamped. And you know what? They had a lot of extras. They even sent an e-mail about "if you want some, we have a lot left over..."

I don't know what to think about all that. I don't even know who the good guys and the bad guy are in this. The perky corporate control freak I kind of identify with: I have OFTEN made mistakes because I was too stubborn to realize that there was a better option, leaning a heavy hint over my face, and all I am bitching about is how I can't see because the right answer is in my way. And the fact the tee-shirt was cheap and flimsy makes me think I am ungrateful (hey, at least we didn't get "oh well, tubby ... lose some weight and be like us!" kind of answer I got with a former company).

It was just a bad day. I didn't write it in my blog when it happened two weeks ago because I was confused as to what I felt, but then this last Friday, we saw the ad that fake Brit directed. I saw myself and about 1000 other grumpy people in cheap ponchos partially walking backwards towards from a small entrance to form our logo. And I laughed. I laughed not just at the silliness of that day, but the fact that you could see the street from the crane. I watched the loop over and over, as traffic drove backwards (including a large cement truck), steam vents sucked in white smoke, and the poorly filled logo wobbled to and fro within the little yellow flags, flapping backwards in the breez-- er, vacuum.

BWAH!

Posted by Punkie @ 11:01 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, October 5, 2003

Massage in a Bottle

I went to Elizabeth Arden and got a Desert Stone massage from someone named Jean. Jean was great, I find no fault in her manner or methods. In fact, everyone in that salon was perky and friendly. I'd go back just for that alone. But I realized, after one hour of being rubbed and kneaded that I have totally lost my ability to relax.

I think this I got from my mother. She worried ALL the time, which is probably why she drank so much, and knowing this is what prevents me from drinking at all. I fear I'd get addicted quicker than a rattlesnake strike. But this is getting ridiculous. It used to be I could get a good massage and be great for days, even weeks. But the whole time I was there, all I worried about in the dark was about my life. My whole mind was focused on a map of at least a dozen possibilities of "what if?" Not really about the massage, but about "What if I lose my job?" or "I need to do laundry!" or even "How will I write about this on my diary?" The massage was worth it, because I felt myself separate from my mind, and then I could, see, clearly, what I already suspected: I think and worry far too much. I mean, I have even said it in this diary, but now it was evident how far and deep these roots of worry ran.

Because I cannot relax, I cannot have any fun. Whenever I am out "having fun," some logical part of me takes over, and I observe it from afar. "Yes," I'll say in my head, "this is quite fun. Brah-vo." I cannot let go. This is probably due to a loss of control issue, tied with the worry thing. Ordinarily I'd think, "Ah, fuggit," but I think it's really affecting my health. I tried anti-depressants at period in my life, and they either made the problem worse (blackouts, hysteria, bleeding) or just gave me a general sense of malaise all the time. I went off of Wellbutrin because even though it removed the highs and lows of my life, it just averaged everything as one long disappointment. At least before I had highs between lows.

Part of the issue is not being able to let go of the past. This online diary is FULL of it. Entries about my childhood and past bad jobs are rampant. It helps to write them down, because for some reason, I figure, once it's committed, I don't have to hold onto it anymore, and since it's public, I have to keep it honest so I don't get over dramatic about it. It's like I am vomiting my past to get rid of the poison in my gut, and I haven't even begun to unravel the true sickness and horror that was my first 18 years. So this diary is like a purge of all the stuff floating in my head that I need to let go of. My mother drank, which was how she let go. During her "chatty phase" of drunkenness, she'd tell all. No secret was safe with her. She was free to say she was unhappy, and that her husband was cruel, and she could say sorry to me for messing up my life because of her mistakes. It was because she told the truth during these times I learned I was a pregnancy to try and get my father to be at home more and settle down, and that he resented me because having a kid ruined his life, and how having me cost her a happy marriage. Nice to know at... age ten. But she NEEDED to spill her guts. She had no outlet except her family and a few friends who only told her to grab me, pack some of our stuff, and get the hell out of that house and never go back. And she didn't want that answer. She wanted someone to fix it all right as she pictured it, and the only happiness she got was to get drunk, say what she had to say, and then pass out in blissful unconsciousness for a few days. Sure, that was a "rotten thing to do," but we aren't all perfect. And I have forgiven this poor woman who just wanted to be happy, but was too stubborn to admit her marriage failed. Bad shit happens to good people, and sometimes, we're too weak to face it or deal with it.

I don't want to end up like her. I love her, and this isn't meant as a slam on her or anything, but I can't keep this all in a bottle. I don't want to be dead at age 40 because of some stress-induced heart attack because I am in denial. I have a wife, child, pets, and lots of friends who I don't want to let down. I want to be free, have fun, and give back three fold what they have given me. And I can't do that if I can't relax.

Posted by Punkie @ 05:59 PM EST [Link]

Friday, October 3, 2003

The Worst Job I Ever Had

I used to be a bank teller. It was... horrific. I have never had a job worse than this job, and for three months I put up with these people before I quit. I don't know if any other banks were like this one, but to this day, I have no respect for the banking industry. The people I worked with were immoral, conniving, backstabbing, patronizing weasels with a vicious hatred for all those who did not fit their diseased "clique."

It started when I quit the bookstore. I quit Crown Books because I couldn't stand being a manager anymore. The upper management was so asinine that I really quit from sheer disgust with how they ran everything. That was probably a mistake, and may have been an elitist move, but one Sunday, when my boss came to my house, past my roommates, and burst open MY ROOM DOOR to yell at me about a messy calendar display while I sat in my bed in my underwear... that was it. No more. The very next day, I came to the store with my key, shook his hand, said I quit, gave him the key, said no hard feelings, and took a train to West Virginia to spend Christmas with my fiancee. The exit was quite stunning, I might add, as I walked out of the store, leaving my boss with my part-time cashier staring at each other...

When I got back, my roommates had found out what I had done, and were quite worried about my end of the rent. I applied for many jobs right when I got back, and one of them was for a bank called Dominion Federal Savings and Loan. It was a mass interview, where there were about 30-50 people milling about the lobby with clipboards. I filled out my application, and waited my turn. The girl who interviewed me liked me and my attitude, so a week later, I got a call from them to report to their training center in Springfield. The pay was $6.25/hr, which back then was pretty good (almost twice minimum wage), and more than I made as a manager of Crown Books.

Training was horrible. Imagine this: teaching someone algebra for the first time, out of sequence, condensed into two weeks. I don't know how I passed the final exam. More than half of my class of 20 failed. College graduates failed. The seven or so that made it pass that training got "On the job" training at our Rossilyn Branch. There were 2-3 of us to a teller, our trainer. The one I got just had root canal surgery that weekend, was on heavy pain meds, and later that week, her boyfriend of two years dumped her. Her password to the computer terminal was her boyfriend's pet name. Guess how bitter she was? That was so surreal, and at the end of the day, her till never balanced, and they sent us away while they balanced it, so we never knew why they didn't balance. That lasted a week.

My first real job was at our Crystal City Branch. Well, in fact, we had two. The Crystal City Underground is a series of shops, banks, and other businesses deep underground in Arlington, Virginia, right across from Reagan National Airport. It's kind of a mall, kind of an office complex, and shuts down at 6pm. Of course, as a bank, we shut down at 2. Now, since there were TWO Crystal City branches (within walking distance of each other), we got each other's calls all the time. What made it worse was that a rival bank, called Dominion Bank, also had a branch in Crystal City. Dominion Bank was a much, much larger chain that pretty much everyone had heard of. People, especially directory services, confused us all the time. So did customers. Hilarity ensues!

The first day I started working there, a customer asked if this was a training branch. I told her Rossilyn was our training branch, and she said, "Funny... I never see the same tellers here for long..." That was my warning shot across my bow. Then I got to know my boss.

Holy cow, what a bitch. I have had some bad bosses in my time, but this snotty little wench was the worst. She was a short little bundle of raw nerves with a professional pixie cut, a button nose, bad makeup, and an attitude like everyone around her was incredibly stupid. She spoke with exasperating sighs, patronizing comments, backhanded compliments, and sometimes outright vicious attacks. One teller said she was "an aggressive sneer." A customer once called her "an emotional disease." Her name was Jane Comer, and somehow, she got pregnant. I knew her from the end of her second trimester until the beginning of the third, and I pray to God her whole personality was due to the fact that hormones were playing with her moods because if she was like this before she got knocked up, God help whatever crotch fruit sprogged from that swamp-witch's stony womb. I pictured her future baby as a rotten peach that plopped from her groin to a urine-soaked pavement in an alley. God, I hated her.

She hated men. Part of her reasoning was she was pregnant and that she didn't know who the father was. She lived with her boyfriend in his trailer, and both of them knew he was not the father. I am sure this is why they argued on the phone so much. Phrases I got from her after such calls were, "Tell me, you're a male... why are you men so fucking stupid?" She patronized everything I did. At first I thought she only hated me, but when we got another male teller, she did the same to him. She also hated young girls, and we had one part-time teller she never stopped picking on. This poor girl, probably 19 years old at the time, was the victim of constant catty remarks from Jane about the girl's supposed sex life. "Honey, when you become my age, men won't care how pretty you are, or how far you spread your legs. It's over, hon. Enjoy the attention while you still can." She always said the girl smelled like sex in a cathouse, and that customers expected a professional girl to handle their money, not a "velvet whore."

Jane made two comments to me that I remember in detail, besides the constant general comments about being a dumb "Alley Oop" male and such (in fact, when I made a mistake, she'd sing the "Alley Oop Oop... Oop... Oop Oop" song. Both comments were about my lunch. One day, she said, "What are you eating?" as I was eating lunch in the back room. Her voice was heavy with the patronizing tones a bully has in grammar school. "A peanut butter and jelly sandwich," I said. "Oh..." she replied, looking down at me with those oversized glasses, like she she was trying to fake approval that one does to a kindergartner when they give you macaroni artwork. "Do you think that's an appropriate lunch for a teller?" I wasn't aware there was a standard, but whatever I answered, she cut it off with walking away from me, leaving me in my shame, I guess. Another day, the same question, in the same tone, was asked about my fried rice. I had gotten some Chinese food earlier, and as I stammered my reply, she cut me off with, "You may think eating their food will make you attractive to those little Asian whores, but let me tell you something, Gregory, they will NEVER really love you. You don't impress me with your supposed exotic tastes." I was not aware that Chinese food, especially from a mall food court, was in any way "exotic," but saying that only made her angrier at me for the rest of the day.

On top of Jane's constant rusty barbed hook of a personality, there were SO many illegal things going on at that branch. Not just a few bucks here and there, but a TON of things that we had been told, in training, was a federal crime as stated by the FDIC. First of all, as a teller, we got bonded and insured. We had an extensive background check, and an interview with an FBI agent, which ended in a photograph and fingerprinting session (in case we decided to embezzle). The FDIC is serious stuff man, you don't want to mess with them. The FBI spent a day in class putting the fear of God in us, including case files of embezzlement, bank fraud, and other things where pretty much everyone ended up getting an ass-pounding in prison. Plus training on what to do during a holdup: don't be a hero, give the robber exactly (nothing more or less) what he or she wants to the letter, remember everything you can (height, weight, scars, accents), and how to spot counterfeit bills. The bank trainers also told us that we should never, ever, ever give out our passwords to our computer logins to anyone, including our bosses, for any reason, and if that occurs, report them immediately. So after this, I thought I was working in an ironclad safety zone.

Not so. First day there, Jane asked me my password. I told her the bank trainers had said-- "Bullshit, give me your password!" she yelled at me. The other tellers told me it was okay, and later told me not to report her because the report line was a recorded message (which I verified from my home later), and that the last teller who complained (a week before I started) was fired the very next day. My password was complicated, because, you know, I came from a computer background. Mine was cthulhu65000, which infuriated Jane to no end because it was so hard to remember. "What the HELL does that mean?" she asked. "It's a spoof of 'Pennsylvania 6-5000,' a song by Glenn Miller." Her reply? "I heard of a song, maybe you know it... 'Alley Oop Oop... Oop... Oop Oop...'" She constantly had a problem with this password, because she could not spell cthulhu. With my password, she did all kinds of illegal balances and transactions for customers. I am not sure why. The transactions she did certainly didn't benefit HER that I could see. Maybe she got paid under the table. Here's the crap her and the assistant manager Nellie did under my login:

- Filed corporate account credits under personal accounts, so the customer would gain interest and evade taxes, which was illegal back then, and probably still is now.
- They forced me to put all my money in their banking system, so I left the only bank I had ever known and loved (Providence Savings, now I don't know who owns them) and deposited my meager earnings into their FDSL.
- Had a "separate booking system" that was a manilla file kept behind the safe for about 200 accounts. This file was then used to make stuff balance out, even though in theory the accounts and transactions never really existed. We had a lot of "special customers," that relied on this folder we weren't allowed to mention to auditors.
- When we got a counterfeit bill, her first policy was to try and "give it back in the next cash transaction with a customer," because any counterfeit report involved a lot of paperwork, and investigation, and "other headache you could get fired for starting." Funny, you'd think $100s or at least $50s would be the most counterfeited. Nope. $20s. Some were so fake (waxy, light-colored, off-center, obviously copy paper, etc.), I couldn't bear to give them back to anyone. Jane took care of those by putting them in our next cash pickup in the middle of a huge bundle of bills. This is probably why we'd get more counterfeit bills through our daily cash bundles than we did from customers.
- Did cash transactions over $10,000 without filing in a Form 4789, an IRS filing that MUST be done by a bank for any large cash transactions. She used to split up customer's deposits and withdrawals over several teller's logins to evade this. We had one sleazy guy who was depositing huge amounts of cash into 10 different accounts, and then having us write money orders to foreign banks. All for $9990 or less. All us tellers assumed this was part of a drug-related transaction.
- Allowed "kiting," the act of circular withdrawals and deposits with different accounts where virtual money is "created" as long as the person deposits money into the account before the check is cashed. They have $20 in Account A, which they write a check for $2000 to Account B, but before the check is cashed, they draw a check on Account B to deposit back into A before the first check is cashed, and then does the cycle again. Only $20 of the money is real, and all the checks never bounce as long as you time it right. Usually this involves separate banks, and more than two accounts, but the reason you do it is either to write a huge fat check in the end and run, or just gain interest from account balances on money that was never real in the first place. We had customers who were OBVIOUSLY doing this, but Jane overrode all the computer warnings to hold the check.
- Some of her transactions caused me to be WAY under or over at the end of the day. She took care of those and told me to go home early.

All this under my login. Traceable only to me. I was so scared that the FBI would come and get me, that after a month there, I was already looking for another job. I had a bleeding ulcer, and got sick a lot. I dreaded work so much, I contemplated suicide. I felt trapped in some horror movie, and felt used and cheap. My moral outrage was constantly screaming at me for putting up with this, and yet my lack of self-confidence and fear of not having a job (remember, I quit the last one, and my roommates got bent out of shape?) kept me there for another month. My friends told me to quit, my fiancee told me to quit. Bruce and Cheryl (former roommates and long-time friends) told me to quit, and even helped me find another job.

The day I applied at Chesapeake Knife and Tool, Chuck (the manager) liked me so much, he wanted me to start immediately. I told him I had to give at least two weeks notice, because when you quit or get fired from a bank, there was an FBI "exit interview," and if you suddenly quit, it's not a good thing. Not at all. He balked, and we eventually made a deal I'd work my last week days at the bank, and nights at his store.

Well, the next day, after work, I told Jane I was handing in my two weeks notice. She didn't seem like this was out of the ordinary (well, after all, remember what that first customer said to me?), and told me to type up my resignation notice. While I was typing this up, she got angrier and angrier. She said I was always a disappointment, and a result due to not filtering out new hires. Then she went on a rant about men in general. I was so happy I was leaving, I didn't care at all. Chuck had suggested I call in sick, and I thought about it a lot. Sick for two weeks. Yes, without pay, but hell, who cared now? Jane got upset at my cheerful mood, and said "You are such a disgrace to the banking industry, I don't ever want to see you again. You might as well never come back!"

"Okay!" I said, and never went back.

The "FBI Exit Interview," which had been trumped up as a two-on-one experience like the third degree was in reality one lady who called me on the phone. She asked me the usual stuff about why I left, and I was quiet until she asked if I had left because of any specific threats of illegal activity and that if I mentioned any parties now, I would be granted immunity if it came to trial. So I spilled the beans. On everything. I named names, named customers, named hidden files, and spilled out broken laws. I confessed some of the worst sins I had seen the bank make, and even speculated on ones I had no proof of. I thought this was going to be the ultimate revenge, like I had been the first to think about it.

No. The FBI lady said she was aware of everything I mentioned, because almost every teller that quit told the same story. "We're making a list," she said, and I never heard from her again. Later, the bank mishandled some of my money and lied to me to try and cover it up. Since I had been an employee with them, I was able not only to point out where the error had been made via the transaction code, but I also traced it to a teller that, technically, didn't work directly with customers; the teller code was for people who made corporate decisions in the home office, so in essence, an employee had embezzled my money. The bank manager was stunned into submission, and gave me my money back. The very next day, I took all my money out and changed to Crestar Bank.

FDSL got in trouble when one of their owners ran off with a lot of the bank's money to "an undisclosed South American country." This saga started while I was still working there, and customers were very nervous about the articles in the Post about it. After I left, the bank renamed itself to "Tustbank," which later got bought out by Household Bank, which merged with Central Fidelity last I checked a few years ago. I sure a lot of records, were, um... "lost." I hope that the customers weren't screwed too badly.

And that's another saga for another time. :)

Posted by Punkie @ 08:23 PM EST [Link]

Character Building - 3d6 (plus mods)

I think I was 21 when I figured out "character building" didn't involve dice. After playing D&D (Dungeons and Dragons for those of you who did NOT grow up in the 1980s) since 1976, I learned data analysis, graphing, mapping, and leadership skills. I would say D&D gave me far more than a gaming experience: it gave me a social life and skills I should have been getting from adults, but wasn't.

That being said, I totally burned out from gaming after I got married. I used to think I knew why this was, but in the last few years, I haven't been as sure. I went from theory to theory because I couldn't stand gaming of any kind for the longest time, and D&D was certainly the top of the list. I burned out because I had so many bad players was one theory. Then the idea that "when I got married and had a social life, I no longer needed gaming," was another. "Maybe it's a control issue," was one of the later ones that crept along in my self-analysis. This caused great consternation to my goodly partner in marriage, who loves games! So over the past few years, I have slowly been getting into gaming again with her help and help of our friends Sean and Jeni. I started with "Apples to Apples" and "Lunch Money." There had always been talk about me starting a game again, and finally, last night, I started being a DM again. All we did was make characters, and I was stunned how much came back to me, after a gap of nearly 15 years. Oof course, I had forgotten a lot, but thanks to my DM Screen (handmade using posterboard, colored pencils, and graph paper), and my extensive documenting through my own adventures (which was because I thought one day, they'd get published), I was able to get up to speed in a matter of days of restudying. Or at least have a clue where to go if I forgot something.

I have one adventure that I will use for their first game next Thursday. It's not only their level, but one of the easiest maps and plots I even did in a neatly wrapped bundle. I wrote it for an RPGA tournament in Baltimore that I never got to. It was my best cumulative work, and I thank my 18-year old butt for being so thorough. I left note on how to play out certain battles, plus clever notes that thought ahead of what would happen if the characters did NOT do something expected, like a "default mode." I laughed because I program computers in a similar style, and it's funny to see I was thinking the same way: "If some idiot enters in a non-number, default to number 5..." and "If the player still decides to try and kill the God's messenger, knock him and the whole party unconscious and they will wake up in a swamp missing one item each." In the computer world, they call this a LART, "Loser Attitude Readjustment Tool." In D&D, we called it "the Ethereal Mummy," based on an example in one of the books where a user is hit by a mummy that appears out of nowhere, causes damage to the troublesome player, and then vanishes before anyone can do anything about it. Now THAT'S character building!

Come to think of it, role playing gaming is very similar to working with computers and users. Huh.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:39 PM EST [Link]

It's Training Men, Hallelujah - Day Three

Well, later yesterday, we actually DID do some hands-on training, but the teacher is so typical of computer people who essential KNOW what they are doing, and don't pause so that others can learn. So he types stuff on the overhead screen like a blur, and when something goes wrong, he zooms about, looking for errors, and if you copied exactly what he did (at his speed), now you have to edit at his speed. Also, he never directly answer your questions. You might ask, "Why did you use apples?" and he'd go, "Well, to answer that, let's look at the history of bananas for a moment..." and then never get back to the actual question you asked. Plus, this guy is more versed in a different style of programming than he's teaching, so he's constantly making syntax errors, and having to use the online help feature of the software.

Because our computers have to go back before close of business today, he has to end class at 3pm, so at least today we get out early, and it is the last day. He passed out "How am I doing?" forms, and I scored him real low. Almost everyone in class is now browsing the web when he talks. Several students didn't even come back today.

I also had the WORST cup of coffee this morning than I have had in... at least 10 years (sorry, FanTek security). There is this "Starbucks Cafe" stand in the building that sells coffee in the morning, and even though I added a lot of cream and sugar, the coffee was so nasty, and so bitter, I only drank it because I needed the boost (which it did give me). Certainly NOT up to Starbucks quality by a long shot. It reminds me of what I thought about coffee before I went to Sweden in 1994: nasty medicine only useful for the purpose of waking you up. Sweet sassy molassy, this coffee was bad, and I had to pay $1.72 for it!

Holy crap, the teacher just GPFed (crashed) his laptop with his own code. Brilliant.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:55 AM EST [Link]

Thursday, October 2, 2003

"So where ya from, boy?"

Years ago, I got sick of telling people from out of town where I lived. Not that I am ashamed of it, far from it, it's just that when you say you are from McLean, Alexandria, or Reston, people go... "Where?" So I say to people I am from Washington, DC.

Washington, District of Columbia. It's a mere 20-30 minute drive from where I live now, and even though I live outside of the beltway, Fairfax is considered part of "the Metro area." Everyone's heard of Washington. In Lule� and Boden, people went, "Oh... I know that place! Capital of America. Wow, how exciting!" To many people around the world, I live in "Washington, America." They probably think I can see the US Capitol from my windows like how people in America thing everyone in Paris can see the Eiffel Tower from theirs. No, probably not, they're better educated than we are. What surprised me is when I lived in Reston, not less than two Swedes said, "Reston! That's in Northern Virginia!" followed by some tale about how they knew that.

Northern Virginia doesn't "feel" like the rest of Virginia. There has been some discussion of whether we'd qualify as a separate state. When I think of Virginia, I think of four major made-up regions: Northern Virginia, Richmond, Virginia Beach, and the middle of nowhere and points west of it. Like islands of buildings in a sea of mountain greenery. I am sure those living in places like Linden, Blacksburg, and Roanoke think I am a right snobbish bastard about now, and I probably deserve it. The truth is, a lot of Virginia is made up of one-horse towns. It seems this is more common knowledge to people outside of Virginia than those who live in Northern Virginia. I am not ashamed of this, but a lot of people in other states think all Virginia consists of are hillbillies living in the mountains, picking banjos, chasing hound dogs, and riding in rusty pickup trucks. I am sure Tennessee and Kentucky can relate.

Virginia if pretty, though. I mean, once you leave Northern Virginia. When I was young, most of Fairfax County was pretty rural. But now it seems like every inch of space that didn't have a building on it now has something on it. The huge swaths of trees that used to filter out wind and pollution are now gone, and ugly houses stand in their place. Some are townhouses, some are huge mansions with postage stamp sized lawns. A few are megalithic shopping centers. But once you drive about 20-30 minutes west, you approach the Blue Ridge, and see the old farms, a few warehouses, and the 6-line roads narrow down to just two. Someday, they, too, will be suburbs of the great DC sprawl.

Already the area between Baltimore and Washington is called The Baltimore Washington Corridor. I expect by 2040, the BWC will be incorporated as one area, like how San Diego and Los Angeles are now. You sort of drive from Richmond, pass some suburban homes, shopping centers, and retirement communities for a while, then the city gets bigger and bigger. At some point, you pass over what used to be the Occoquan River and Potomac (which will then be a series of underground pipes) into the beginning of the huge city around Woodbridge, where the "Historic Potomac Mills Mall" will sport a "Coca Cola Welcomes You to South Baltington" sign. At this point, you could go up through Historic Washington, pass several mega-malls, and end up at North Baltington, aka "Historic Philadelphia." Then starts the logical district of the Jersey-York Sprawl.

I think I'll start start practicing saying "US East," when the next person asks me.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:28 PM EST [Link]

Training Wreck - Day Two

Man. This class is dull. My worst fears were realized when I learned that we are not doing anything actually ON the computers, we're just going to learn college-level theory, which would be fine if that's what I came for, but sadly, I came to learn how to program in VB.NET. I mean, we're learning Object-Oriented programming, which I understand WHY we have it, and what the theory is behind it, but I want to actually apply it to something useful! Half the class is typing on IMs, browsing the web, and since I am writing in my journal, you can see where this is going.

The guy to the right of me is searching the web. The guy behind me is sleeping. The guy to the left of me has been sending mail and writing IMs. The guy in front of me is reading ESPN News. One of the students here is a DEAD ringer for Tobey Maguire; I keep thinking he'll turn into Spiderman. Thank God for VNC, because I can log into my work computer and do work from there. In fact, I am typing this entry in a spellchecker on my work computer, which is currently several miles away. I finally got sick of everything, and tried to write my own program, using the VB Studio, and getting a lot further learning on my own. Ugh ... this is excruciating. Apparently the teacher wrote a book or something, because he keeps dropping this fact more than I do about my book, even on my own website (still avalable for $5). I cannot wait until lunch.

Last note, there's the student I first met when I had to work with Hong Kong node tests. That project was abandoned when we pulled out of China, but somehow he stayed employed working on other stuff. He knows very little English, but he's trying so hard, and he's so likeable, I can't help but feel like being his pal. I can never understand him, because his Mandarin accent is so thick, but his sheer effort is inspiring. I mean, not only is he learning technology, but he's learning it in a language he doesn't toally understand.

Hey, people are leaving! Is it lunch...? No... they just gave up. Dang.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:33 AM EST [Link]

Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Mini-mob mentality or "Why did you stop being liked?"

I was talking with someone the other day about paranoia, and whether people actually conspire, en masse, to do something bad to someone. I mentioned a few things I had seen others do, and explained what I see usually happen in this smaller version of "mob mentality."

Say you have a social group composed of ten people. Let's say #1 doesn't like you. #1 is friends with #2 and #3, and he manages to form a small hate group, either directly or unconsciously through gossip and body posture. #4-7 are pretty wishy-washy, and are easily swayed by the nearest social tide. They are the next to go, albeit slightly less forceful. #8-#10 are your friends, and a sort of protective wall that will defend attacks or push the sway of #4-7 back the other way. What comes next may be essentially a stalemate (most common result), the hate backfires on the aggressor, or your friends start to hate you, and suddenly the whole group hates you like falling duckpins. If you never had good friends to start with, you will almost definitely lose. If you are pretty social and make everyone happy most of the time, chances are the aggressor will have to stand down. It's kind of like watching waves of grass in the wind, going back and forth.

A lot of people I know suffer from having a whole group just suddenly hate them, but they don't seem to realize that the hate may have stemmed from just one person who turned the tide. Many people just "go with the flow" and if it seems everyone agrees you suck, then... who's to stop them? Let's say someone is a member of a chess club. They join, and do really well. In our example, let's say the new guy makes friends, but doesn't realize his new found fame has attracted shallow people who want to look good by being near him, and one enemy, a guy who has felt generally threatened by everything since he was a kid. The enemy has friends, who turn the tide of the wishy-washy against him, and since the new guy's friends aren't very deep, they panic, and go with the flow of how much the new guy sucks. The new guy didn't have to do anything, and he's tossed out of the chess club because of one guy with a will stronger (albeit more desperate) than the rest of the group. And the thing is, the new guy never saw it coming. The new guy gets paranoid, and timid because of this "unpredictable" response, and so his next attempt to be part of a club might make him bitter, which will not make him any more liked, it may happen again, and thus the cycle continues until he's a bitter, antisocial mope who hates people in general because they all seem to conspire against him.

This can happen to anyone. You could have been a member of your sewing circle since the 1970s, and suddenly some new blood with an agenda can do this to you out of nowhere. It won't be easy, unless other members of the circle despised you and you couldn't tell, but it can happen to the best of us. Things that trigger it are usually someone who joins a group and suddenly becomes popular, someone who is already halfway to being an "outcast" (clothing, facial features, ethnicity, religion, etc.), or someone how has had this happen to them before. They almost radiate a kind of desperateness that many women have told me single men give out when looking for girls. You can almost smell the need to reject them.

What to do? Well, I always try and keep a lot of friends in different groups, try not to show off, and keep making new friends in case I lose the older ones, which in the area is usually because they move away due to their job. It's not foolproof, but it's the best working model I have. If you have had this happen to you, you might want to try with a new group of people totally unrelated to the ones you had before. Join the group quietly, and learn the wisdom of silence. Work your way up socially by joining conversations without dominating them; take a passive role for a while before becoming more active. Allow people to make friends with you before you try and make friends with them. If you are open to it, they should come on their own. Be respectful, don't engage in gossip to be "popular," and don't force your way into a conversation without being invited. Soon, you will have your own group of friends you can rely on, and once you know who your friends are, come to their defense. Give them credit where credit is due, and after a while, you will be a good part of the group. Then if anyone decides to hate you, it will be tough to knock you out.

Oh, and don't be a jerk. I would think this was obvious, but "treat others as you would treat yourself" is not good advice for someone who already hates themselves. That's why I suggested the passive approach.

Best of luck! :)

Posted by Punkie @ 07:19 PM EST [Link]

Training Derailed - Day One

I am in training the rest of the week, learning (in theory) VB.NET. I've had worse teachers, but this guy is on the low end of my teacher scale because his voice is low, mumbles, and he's constantly backtracking. So a lot of today has been like this: "So when you inherit the class, I mean, the parent class... I mean, the method of the class ... no, wait, parent class, then you, ah ... mumble mumble mumble override, mumble mumble with the method that you declared as the base class, well, not the BASE BASE class, but the base of the parent ... no wait, yes, you do get the base base class of the original ... uh, parent. Yes, that looks right ... okay?" He does this on the board, too. He does not give handouts, so we have to take notes from what he draws on the whiteboard, and then he keeps changing what he wrote as he sees his error. He has the advanatge of having an eraser, I only have this highlighting pen. And there is too much lecture, not enough hands on stuff. I have been here for six hours, and we haven't even launched the VB Studio yet. I am hoping all this makes sense when I actually, you know, program something.

I hate when I am this bored. Luckily, most of the students also don't get it, but sadly, many of them get stuck on what I think is obvious, and then the teacher says something different from what he just said before. Then when I try and listen when he's actually facing the class, and not the board, I got these two guys behind me who won't stop talking. One of them is a complete VB.NET guru, who has actually walked the teacher through several things where he got stuck, so I can't tell him to shut up, because we need him from time to time. I give up, and I keep saying to myself, "Maybe I'll finally understand when we actually do something."

Arrg...

Posted by Punkie @ 03:11 PM EST [Link]